Wednesday, May 7, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Hebrew Union College
1 West 4th Street (at Broadway)
New York, NY10012
Free event, registration is required
The book Sing, Memory is also available for purchase or can be purchased at the event.
Reception and Book Signing to follow.
“[Eyre] skillfully recounts the remarkable story of Kulisiewicz’s survival…. He is a deft storyteller, with a limpid style, moving his characters to centre stage, aside, then back again. He weaves a compelling, well-informed narrative and illuminates the inner dynamics of the camp’s power structure…. Sing, Memory is a moving story of courage and determination amid overwhelming loss, all the more powerful for its heartbreaking sense of what might have been.” -The Economist
“Soulful… meticulous”-The Wall Street Journal
Join us for the book presentation of “SING, MEMORY” The Remarkable Story of the Man Who Saved the Music of the Nazi Camps by, Makana Eyre. In conversation with Bret Werb, Musicologist, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
About the book
A Polish musician, a Jewish conductor, a secret choir, and the rescue of a trove of music from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
On a cold October night in 1942, SS guards at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp violently disbanded a rehearsal of a secret Jewish choir led by conductor Rosebery d’Arguto. Many in the group did not live to see morning, and those who survived the guards’ reprisal were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau just a few weeks later. Only one of its members survived the Holocaust. Yet their story survives, thanks to Aleksander Kulisiewicz. An amateur musician, he was not Jewish, but struck up an unlikely friendship with d’Arguto in Sachsenhausen. D’Arguto tasked him with a mission: to save the musical heritage of the victims of the Nazi camps.
In Sing, Memory, Makana Eyre recounts Kulisiewicz’s extraordinary transformation from a Polish nationalist into a guardian of music and culture from the Nazi camps. Aided by an eidetic memory, Kulisiewicz was able to preserve for posterity not only his own songs about life at the camp, but the music and poetry of prisoners from a range of national and cultural backgrounds. They composed symphonies, organized clandestine choirs, arranged great pieces of music by illustrious composers, and gathered regularly over the course of the war to perform for one another. For many, music enabled them to resist, bear witness, and maintain their humanity in some of the most brutal conditions imaginable.
After the war, Kulisiewicz returned to Poland and assembled an archive of camp music, which he went on to perform in more than a dozen countries. He dedicated the remainder of his life to the memory of the Nazi camps. Drawing on oral history and testimony, as well as extensive archival research, Eyre tells this rich and affecting human story of musical resistance to the Nazi regime in full for the first time.
About the author
Makana Eyre is an author and journalist based in Paris. He writes about politics, culture, and history for publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, the Guardian, the Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Politico. In 2023, WW Norton published Sing, Memory, a book of nonfiction about music in the Nazi camps and Eyre’s debut. The Economist described Eyre as a “deft storyteller, with a limpid style” and lauded the book for its “compelling, well-informed narrative.” Sing, Memory was also praised by the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, the Forward, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and the Jewish Book Council, which described it as “riveting” and “masterfully written.” The book has been translated into Italian and Dutch. Eyre is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School and teaches journalism and media history at Sciences Po in Paris.
