History of Sorts

Music soothes the savage beast—that is what Eric Vogel must have thought when he sent a petition to the Commander of the Theresienstadt camp on 8 January 1943. It was to start a jazz band named the Ghetto Swingers. The band would include the following members: Dr Brammer (piano), Dr Kurt Bauer (percussion), Fr. Goldschmidt (guitar), Fasal (bass), Ing. Vogel (trumpet), Langer (tenor sax and clarinet), and Fr. Mautner (trombone).

As crazy as it may seem—the request was granted. The band was formed, and the Jewish prisoners organized in the ghetto a lively cultural scene that included jazz music.

The jazz classic I Got Rhythm by George Gershwin became the band’s theme. Also, the prisoners’ favourite song was the 1932 Bei Mir Bistu Shein composed by Sholom Secunda. The song is better known as Bei Mir Bist du Schön, the 1936 hit of the Andrew Sisters.

The Ghetto Singers also included guitarist Coco Schumann  Kurt Gerron and clarinetist Bedřich “Fritz” Weiss, who had joined later.

After being pressurized following the deportation of Danish Jews to Theresienstadt, the Germans permitted representatives from the Danish Red Cross and the International Red Cross to visit in June 1944

After the Red Cross inspection, Commandant Rahm instructed Gerron to make a propaganda film. Filming took place over eleven days between 16 August and 11 September 194. The Ghetto Swingers participated in this Nazi propaganda film, “Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area,” which is also known as, albeit with the erroneous name, “The Fuehrer Gave the Jews a City.”

After that camp closed, the members of the jazz band were sent to Auschwitz.

In Auschwitz, Coco Schumann had to play [for the SS hangmen], “for hours and hours every day, especially when they tattooed the new arrivals, because they considered it such boring work. Four members of the band survived. They were were Eric Vogel, Coco Schumann and Martin Roman and Kurt Gerron.

To end this blog, I leave you with the aforementioned, Bei Mir Bistu Shein, played by the Ghetto Swingers.

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