For more information, refer to the Aleksander Kulisiewicz collection of sound recordings in RG-91 or RG-55 at USHMM.
Aleksander (Alexander) Kulisiewicz (1918-1982) was born in Kraków, Poland in 1918. He was a law student in German-occupied Poland when, in October 1939, he was denounced for antifascist writings, arrested by the Gestapo, and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, near Berlin. An amateur singer and songwriter, Kulisiewicz composed 54 songs during more than five years of imprisonment at Sachsenhausen. After Russian troops liberated the camp on May 2, 1945, he remembered his songs, as well as those learned from fellow prisoners, dictating hundreds of pages of text to his attending nurse at a Polish infirmary. The majority of Kulisiewicz’s songs are darkly humorous ballads concerning the sadistic treatment of prisoners. Performed at secret gatherings, imbued with biting wit and subversive attitude, these songs helped inmates cope with their hunger and despair, raised morale, and offered hope of survival. Beyond this spiritual and psychological purport, Kulisiewicz also considered the camp song to be a form of documentation. “In the camp,” he wrote, “I tried under all circumstances to create verses that would serve as direct poetical reportage. I used my memory as a living archive. Friends came to me and dictated their songs.” In the 1950s, Kulisiewicz began amassing a private collection of music, poetry, and artwork created by camp prisoners, gathering this material through correspondence and hundreds of hours of recorded interviews. In the 1960s, he inaugurated a series of public recitals of his repertoire of camp songs, and issued several recordings. Kulisiewicz’s major project, a monumental study of the cultural life of the camps and the vital role music played as a means of survival for many prisoners, remained unpublished at the time of his death. He toured both Europe and the United States performing concerts of his works and the works of other Holocaust survivors until about 1980. He died in Kraków, Poland, on March 12, 1982. His archive is the largest extant collection of music composed in the camps.
Czarny Böhm Black Böhm
Wilhelm Böhm, nicknamed"Czarn" (black) Böhm, was among the more grisly denizens of Sachsenhausen camp. Short and hunchbacked, with long, ape-like arms, Böhm, a camp Kapo, was also distinctly charred in appearance due to his work as a cremation specialist. Wildly enthusiastic about his job, Böhm had been known to cry out to passing prisoners,"Come to Böhm! You'll surely be coming my way soon, so why not now" Kulisiewicz reports that in 1941-1942 Böhm helped cremate some 18,000 Soviet prisoners of war murdered at Sachsenhausen. He is thought to have died of a contagious infection in 1943. Kulisiewicz first performed Czarny Böhm at a cabaret staged by the inmates of Block 23 on New Year's eve, 1942. The first three stanzas of the song are meant to represent the voice of the ghoulish Böhm, while the final stanza shifts to Kulisiewicz's own point of view. This is a camp adaptation of Ruthenian folk song,"I szumyt, i hudyt"