In Sachsenhausen, a number of upper-class Poles sought to preserve their social advantages by courting favors from the camp command. Kulisiewicz rebukes two such prisoners"Lulusinsk" and the"Coun"-in this brief song from 1944. Both"aristocrat" had betrayed members of the Polish Communist underground to the Reich Criminal Police Office, leading to the arrest of several inmates. In turn, other camp elites denounced Kulisiewicz to the authorities for writing and performing his derisive song. He was removed from his barrack in the middle of the night in February, 1945, and interrogated by the SS Police. The"Beggars Bloc" named in the song's first line was camp slang for an enormous barrack housing 600-800 prisoners. This is a camp adaptation of an unidentified tune.
Performed by Aleksander Kulisiewicz
Zimno, panie! It's Cold, Sir!
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.