Music played a huge role for those trying to survive; it helped to remember, it supported resistance, it allowed lament and it forged solidarity. Many know about the orchestras in the camps, particularly Theresienstadt. But I chose a political song by Ernst Busch today, written while he was a camp inmate, because it became an international symbol for resistance by political prisoners against the Nazis.
https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/music/detail.php?content=moor
The poem represents for me the epiphany of loss:
My Blue Piano
I call a blue piano my own
Yet I know not a single note.
The dark cellar door has become its home
Since the world turned to rotten bloat.
Starlit hands used to play a four-handed tone
– While Luna sang in her boat –
Now the rats’ dance sounds out a clinking moan.
The keys are broken, lying prone.
Tears for the blue corpse choke my throat.
I beg you, dear angels, permit me to roam
– I ate bread made of bitter oat –
Through the gates, while alive, to the heavenly throne
Though the law disallows such a vote.
Else Lasker-Schüler