摘要：The Collections Department of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum retains many arrangements of popular songs that were performed by the men’s orchestra of Auschwitz I. These songs often bear highly ironic but tragically relevant titles: “Letters That Never Arrived,” “Hours That One Can Never Forget,” “Sing a Song When You’re Sad.” A number of these songs are in the form of manuscript parts, written with great care in black ink on Beethoven Papier brand music paper. In this essay, I examine the manuscript parts for one of these songs, “Die schönste Zeit des Lebens” (The Most Beautiful Time of Life), to learn more about the identity of the prisoner copyists and how these songs might have functioned in a concentration camp. The Collections Department of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum retains many arrangements of popular songs that were performed by the men’s orchestra of Auschwitz I.[1] These songs often bear highly ironic but tragically relevant titles: “Letters That Never Arrived,” “Hours That One Can Never Forget,” “Sing a Song When You’re Sad.” A number of these songs are in the form of manuscript parts, written with great care in black ink on Beethoven Papier brand music paper. In this essay, I examine the manuscript parts for one of these songs, “Die schönste Zeit des Lebens” (The Most Beautiful Time of Life), to learn more about the identity of the prisoner copyists and how these songs might have functioned in a concentration camp. In Music of Another World, Szymon Laks, one of the conductors of the men’s orchestra in Birkenau (Auschwitz II), described how musician deaths and hospitalizations forced him to use odeon, a music notation “which makes it possible for any group to perform any work regardless of the presence or absence of one or even a few musicians.”[2] The constantly changing membership of the men’s orchestra in Auschwitz I, due to illness, selections, suicides, murder, releases, and transfers to other camps, would make it challenging to identify the members of the orchestra during any period of its existence. (In fact, there is only one surviving document listing the members of the Auschwitz I men’s orchestra, but it is dated November 21, 1944, after most of the original prisoners in the orchestra were transferred to other camps.)[3] The manuscripts of the popular songs, however, are occasionally signed with prisoner numbers, which can be linked to names and dates of imprisonment. In the second half of this essay, I look for similar clues in other manuscripts at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum to establish a chronology and identify additional prisoners who created these song arrangements.
