In the years after the Holocaust, many pieces of music
have been composed commemorating Holocaust
events or experiences.
Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, composed in
1947, presents audiences with a fictional representation of
the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In fact, it contains inaccurate
information about the Warsaw ghetto, for example the
mention of gas chambers even though none existed in the
ghetto.
In 1962, the Russian poet Evgeny Evtushenko visited the
site of Babi Yar, a deep ravine northwest of Kiev, where in
September 1941 an estimated 70,000 Jews were executed
by Nazi soldiers. This was one of the largest mass murders
at an individual location during World War II (see box
below).
Evtushenko returned to his hotel room and immediately
wrote a memorial poem in which the first line, which reads:
There are no monuments over Babi Yar,
the steep precipice, like a rough-hewn tomb
reflected his ‘refusal to accept the injustice of history, the
absence of a monument to so many innocent slaughtered
people’. Not long after this, Shostakovich read the poem
and decided to set it as part of a symphonic work that
would include five movements, each of them based on an
Evtushenko poem.
In Different Trains (1988), Steve Reich presents a semi-
autobiographical account of the Holocaust that elec-
tronically mixes his memories of being a Jewish child in
the 1940s with those of child-survivors of the Holocaust
who later recorded their testimonies.
