Out of the depths - the first collection of Holocaust songs
Cover of Mima’amakim, image courtesy of the Silberfeld-Sapera families
By Dr Joseph Toltz
On 19 October, Dr Joseph Toltz presented at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s Musicology Colloquium Series. The title of the talk was Out of the depths: complexity, subjectivity and materiality in the first collection of Holocaust songs. The talk focused on the first post-Holocaust songbook Mima’amakim, compiled by Yehuda Eismann in Bucharest in June 1945, a copy of which recently appeared in a private collection in Sydney, Australia. The tiny pamphlet contained songs that would become part of the canonic memorialising repertoire of the Shoah, songs that disappeared from all other written accounts, clues to the contributors and places of origin of the songs and a testimonial introduction by the compiler. In the talk, Toltz questioned the nature of a material object to open further conversations on the place of music inside and outside testimony. He also delved into the issue of the process of canonisation of a body of testimonial songs. Toltz will be travelling to Israel in January 2017 with Dr. Anna Boucher (Department of Government and International Studies), to research contributors to the songbook. The two scholars will work in archives at Yad Vashem, Bet Hatefusot, Bet Leyvik and the Ghetto Fighters House Museum.
Linda Dessau AM, pictured with Dr. Joseph Toltz
On 8 November, Dr Joseph Toltz was special guest at the Dunera Association Reunion in Melbourne. The Dunera Association represents the remaining survivors and descendants of the men, women and children forcibly deported from the UK on the SS Dunera in 1940, and from Singapore on the Queen Mary later that year. These people held German and Austrian papers, but many were Jewish, of Jewish descent, conscientious objectors or anti-Nazis. Despite such obvious mitigating factors, the British Government declared them all to be “hostile enemy aliens” and decided to forcibly deport them to internment camps in rural Australia. The “Dunera Boys” as they came to be known, were released in 1942. Many returned to the UK, some migrated to the USA, but many also stayed in Australia and made enormous cultural and social contributions to the country. Toltz is researching the music of four Dunera Boys: Werner Baer, Boas Bischofswerder, Felix Werder and Walter Wurzburger, and he will present their compositions as part of the Sydney Out of the Shadows festival. The keynote speaker at the Dunera Association’s dinner was Her Excellency the Governor of Victoria, the Honourable Linda Dessau AM, who spoke about her connection to various Dunera boys in Melbourne. The lunch also heard from trustees of the Hay Internment and Prisoner of War Camps Interpretive Centre and the Tatura Irrigation and Wartime Camps Museum. Hay was the first internment camp site, an exceptionally isolated town in the Riverina district, in between Sydney and Adelaide. Tatura was the site of the second internment camp, and is in the Goulburn Valley, 167km north of Melbourne.