The Ruth Rubin Legacy
Archive of Yiddish Folksongs

Ghetto songs

Title

Ghetto songs

Description

"Most of the songs were created in the ghettos set up by the Germans in 1940 in Warsaw, Kovno, Vilna, Lodz, Bialystok, Riga, Cracow, and other centers. The songs described the crowded quarters, the food scarcities, the backbreaking toil, the irritations, abnormalities, humiliations, degradations heaped upon Jews from all over Europe, who had been driven into the ghettos together. The ghetto songs reveal the capacity for suffering and the elemental will to survive--the natural urge to create, to sing and even laugh." (From Voices of a People, p. 424).

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Citation

“Ghetto songs,” YIVO Online Exhibitions, accessed April 27, 2024, https://ataleoftwomuseums.yivo.org/items/show/2150.
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