c. 2000 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) “To look at us, you wouldn’t have believed that anything was happening,” she says in a soft British accent.
“I’ve got a photo of my mother, father, grandfather, the Sunday before I came to England, and we look so innocent; we’re sitting in a cafe, the trees are in bloom, it’s midsummer, my mother’s got a 1930s dress on and a smart hat. You wouldn’t think anybody had a care in the world.”
We would be wrong. The innocence frozen in that photograph died a few weeks later in the Holocaust. The voice, no longer associated with a name, lives on in “Voices of the Shoah: Remembrances of the Holocaust,” a boxed set of four compact discs (or cassette tapes) and a hardbound book recently released by Rhino Records in time for Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, on May 2.
Richard Foos, co-founder and president of the label best known for its retro-kitsch repackaging of pop culture, says the Holocaust package wasn’t that much of a departure for Rhino. “What we try to do is take important events or important parts of history, important genres, and try to produce audio projects so one might put their arms around a particular subject,” Foos said in a telephone interview.
Recent Rhino offerings have included collections of the greatest speeches and greatest poems of the 20th century. In “Voices of the Shoah,” Rhino tackles what many consider the greatest evil of the 20th century.
The impressive package, five years in the making, was produced by filmmaker David Notowitz. It includes a 100-page book containing transcripts of the interviews, photographs, maps, historical background, discussion questions and an extensive bibliography.
But at the heart of the project are the voices, almost four hours of first-hand accounts of the Holocaust (“Shoah” in Hebrew), narrated by actor Elliott Gould and recorded with background music and sound effects to create a richly evocative experience of Jewish life and death before, during and after World War II.
Survivors describe family life in Europe before the war, days when good grades and getting up for a soccer game were the most pressing parts of every day. One man recounts a splendid summer vacation in the town that would become Auschwitz. Another recalls the prejudice he encountered as a Jew and how hard he had to nag his mother before she agreed to take him to Vienna for Hitler’s birthday parade.
“This was the big cheese coming to town,” he remembers thinking. “Saw him between other people’s legs, but I saw him.”
The firsthand accounts, drawn from 180 recent and archived interviews, describe the rise of anti-Semitism, ghetto life, deportation and the concentration camps, liberation by the Allies and resettlement and readjustment to life after the war.
But the strength of this audio effort lies in the parts of the story that may be less familiar: firsthand accounts of resistance in the forests of Poland and within the concentration camps themselves; the appalling conditions of the displaced person camps, where thousands of Jews languished after liberation; and a second-generation survivor, a physician who struggles with his family’s past whenever a patient claims his or her life is not worth living.
These stories are, at once, hard to hear and difficult to turn away from. Voices crack with emotion, bristle with anger, stumble over the unspeakable. The package comes with a warning that children 13 years old and younger should not listen without an adult present. “After listening to this collection,” the book cautions, “children may have many questions. Leave enough time in your schedule to thoroughly discuss the most troubling issues.”
Rhino is donating its proceeds from sales of the set ($69.98 for CDs, $54.98 for cassette tapes) to the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. Said Foos, “We thought this was the type of project that we didn’t feel morally that we wanted to make money from.”
KRE END HAUGHT
