As part of our Online Programming opportunities, the Holocaust Documentation & Education Center is pleased to share the following program from The Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center:

Program:  “A Prisoner’s Voice: Poetry of Psychological Resistance”

Date:        Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Time:        12:00 PM

Platform:  This event will take place online and is free to the public.

Please note, registration is required. Please click here to register.

To watch the program in full please click here.

Farewell, Auschwitz provides a glimpse into prisoner life in one of the darkest chapters of human history, and brings to life the power of music and poetry to bring light to despair. Krystyna Zywulska was a Polish political prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland from 1943 to her escape in 1945. While imprisoned, Zywulska wrote lyrics and set them to familiar folk, classical, and popular tunes from the period, and prisoners performed the resulting songs and shared the words as a means of coping with the horrors of the camp. Before imprisonment, Zywulska had not written a single song; Nazi oppression appears to have inspired her creative blossoming.

Farewell, Auschwitz: Music by Jake Heggie; Text from poetry of Krystyna Zywulska, written at Auschwitz, 1943-1945; Jennifer Gliere, soprano, Roz Woll, mezzo-soprano, Steven Dahlke, baritone, Mirna Lekić, piano.

This event is part of the 2020-21 Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center (KHC) and National Endowment for the Humanities Colloquium entitled, Internment & Resistance: Confronting Mass Detention and Dehumanization. Co-sponsored by the Queensborough Performing Arts Center (QPAC) and presented in partnership with the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center, Cincinnati.