Music played a huge role for those trying to survive; it helped to remember, it supported resistance, it allowed lament and it forged solidarity. Many know about the orchestras in the camps, particularly Theresienstadt. But I chose a political song by Ernst Busch today, written while he was a camp inmate, because it became an international symbol for resistance by political prisoners against the Nazis.

https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/music/detail.php?content=moor

The poem represents for me the epiphany of loss:

My Blue Piano

 

I call a blue piano my own

Yet I know not a single note.

 

The dark cellar door has become its home

Since the world turned to rotten bloat.

 

Starlit hands used to play a four-handed tone

– While Luna sang in her boat –

Now the rats’ dance sounds out a clinking moan.

 

The keys are broken, lying prone.

Tears for the blue corpse choke my throat.

 

I beg you, dear angels, permit me to roam

– I ate bread made of bitter oat –

Through the gates, while alive, to the heavenly throne

Though the law disallows such a vote.

 

Else Lasker-Schüler

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/lasker-schueler-else