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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Politics & government

SING, MEMORY

Makana Eyre

The Remarkable Story of the Man Who Saved the Music of the Nazi Camps

SING, MEMORY is a journey into musical resistance to the Nazi regime from within the electrified walls of the camps and an untold yet vital part of the history of the Holocaust.

Aleksander Kulisiewicz, a young Polish Catholic, is arrested for publishing anti-Nazi propaganda in his occupied homeland and imprisoned at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1940. There, he strikes up an unusual friendship with a famous Jewish conductor, Rosebery d'Arguto, who is leading a secret Jewish choir in the camp. Kulisiewicz, who like many of his fellow Poles had been drawn to nationalist and anti-Semitic ideas before the war, experiences a profound change of heart, and when it becomes clear that the Jews interned at Sachsenhausen will all be deported to Auschwitz, d'Arguto tasks him with saving the music and songs composed and performed in the camps. Gifted with an eidetic memory, Kulisiewicz manages to literally archive over 600 songs in his head. After the war, which he barely survives, he makes it his mission to preserve and perform them all over the world in order to ensure that the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust will be kept alive. MAKANA EYRE is a journalist based between Paris and New York. He covers politics, the far right, and the media, with a focus on France and Central/Eastern Europe. His work has recently appeared in, or is forthcoming from, among others, The Nation, The Guardian, The Atavist, Foreign Policy, Columbia Journalism Review and the Haitian Times. He serves as a contributing editor at Notes from Poland and is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he was a fellow at the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.

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Book Published 2023-05-23 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

Dutch: Thomas Rap ; Italian: Newton Compton ; Romanian: RAO

Beginning with its perfect title, this nonfiction work is an astonishing chronicle of musical resistance.

Journalist Eyre debuts with a poignant account of one man's campaign to preserve the music created by concentration camp prisoners during WWII... Sparely written yet deeply moving, this is a powerful study of the healing power of art.

Riveting... This is a masterfully written biography of a man who performed music from concentration camps for audiences of all ages, backgrounds, and eras. Kulisiewicz was able to record Songs from the Depths of Hell, an album produced by Peter Wortsman and Moe Asch that appears in the Smithsonian Folkways catalog, and he toured in Chicago and Milwaukee after Peter Wortsman wrote about him in Sing Out!Magazine. But because most postwar audiences were unwilling to listen to his bleak and searing material, he became irascible and difficult. His tragic story reflects the sacrifices of a man who, as a Polish national with German blood, could have chosen to keep quiet and avoid his fate in Sachsenhausen - but didn't.

Mr Eyre, an American journalist who lives in Paris, skilfully recounts the remarkable story of Kulisiewicz's survival and of the archive he went on to build. He is a deft storyteller, with a limpid style, moving his characters to centre stage, aside, then back again. He weaves a compelling, well-informed narrative and illuminates the inner dynamics of the camp's power structure... SING, MEMORY is a moving story of courage and determination amid overwhelming loss, all the more powerful for its heartbreaking sense of what might have been.

With rare immediacy (...) Eyre's narrative captures the poignancy of Kulisiewicz's life story.

An uplifting story of music emanating from the depths of one of the 20th century's most horrific periods... A significant new chapter of Holocaust history.