How a Forgotten Holocaust Songbook Survived Decades in Hiding

In the spring of 1945, weeks after liberation, a Jewish editor named Yehuda Eismann sat in a Bucharest office and compiled a small pamphlet of songs composed in the Nazi camps and ghettos of occupied Poland. He printed five hundred copies, but almost all were lost. One survived in a Sydney cupboard for decades, undisturbed, until it was rediscovered in 2013. Published last year by Manchester University Press, Out of the Depths reconstructs the origins of each song and traces the postwar journeys of the survivors connected to the book, among them Olga R., the violinist and Holocaust survivor who carried this copy to Australia. The following excerpt from Out of the Depths: The First Collection of Holocaust Songs by Joseph Toltz and Anna Boucher tells her story.

In November 1914, in the small town of Stary Sącz (at the time, in the northern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), a young woman named Anna S. was heavily pregnant with her second child. The war front was closing in and a threat of pogrom to the local Jewish population influenced the family – Anna, husband Nacham and their two-year-old son Ichek/Izidor – to flee 220 km south to the Hungarian town of Miskolc. On 27 November, Anna gave birth to her daughter, Olga.

The R. family returned to Stary Sącz once the threat had passed, remaining in the town as it became part of the Second Polish Republic. Olga’s father, Nacham, helped his mother-in-law, Rosalia Holländer, in a general store situated at the front of their property. Rosalia was Olga’s babcia (grandma) and a powerful influence in her life. Because of her blindness, she would get her granddaughter to read the newspaper to her and the news of the rise of Hitler particularly perturbed her. After the death of Olga’s grandfather, Baruch Holländer, Anna took over the shop and Nacham began a soda water business, selling to local shops. The family was part of a small Jewish population in the town and was religiously observant. At the age of seven, Olga attended the local public school and received a thorough education. She remembers very few antisemitic incidents during her childhood and had a kind and helpful teacher. The town’s Jewish youth were part of the HaNoar HaTsiyoni (Zionist Youth) movement, and in her early teens she led the young division. The movement kept up to date with current affairs and news from Palestine, and a shaliach (emissary/instructor) was employed to teach the young people conversational Hebrew.

Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Olga had relocated to the larger town of Nowy Sącz, Poland, where she worked for her uncle and aunt in their office. After the invasion on 1 September 1939, she contacted her parents and a decision was made for the family – Olga, her aunt and uncle and parents – to flee to the east, so they obtained a cart and horse and travelled towards Lwów, where Ichek was studying engineering. Thousands of refugees were on the roads and they had constantly to hide from the strafing of Luftwaffe airplanes. Eventually the five abandoned their horse and cart and boarded a train, but they were bombed at the town of Drohobych, where Olga was injured on the head. A decision was made to stay in the town for two months. Towards the end of 1939 the Germans invaded Drohobych, intent on capturing its valuable oil refinery. However, within a week they had withdrawn to the demarcation point that divided Poland between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and the Russians occupied the city.

Life under the Soviets was safer, but the family decided to travel farther east, to Тернопіль (Ternopil/Tarnopol), because Olga’s paternal aunt and her husband were living there. Here, Olga went to work as a waiter and kitchen hand. Ichek wrote to Olga about the prospect of a job in Lwów, so she travelled back west to start work at a drycleaner shop with Bertha, sister of her childhood best friend. She took lodgings with the Kornreich family, friends of Ichek. Meanwhile, in Ternopil, her aunt and uncle and mother and father were missing; they had been officially registered by the Soviet government for return to Stary Sącz with Soviet officials. Unbeknownst to them, all registrants were deemed enemies of the state and were rounded up for deportation to Siberia. Luckily, the aunt and uncle had claims to Czechoslovakian citizenship, so they were sent to Moscow, but Olga’s parents had to endure years in the east.

Following the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia in June 1941, German army units arrived in Lwów and engaged in fierce fighting, assisted by Ukrainian collaborators. Olga’s friend Bertha was shot in the arm and had to be taken to the Rappaport Hospital, where she stayed for two months. All Jewish companies were confiscated and non-Jews placed in charge of key positions – fortunately, the new Ukrainian manager at Olga’s company was polite and kind and did not treat Jewish workers differently. At first, Olga defied the order to wear the Jewish star on her clothing. Before the establishment of the ghetto in the second half of 1941, Ichek had already decided to flee east with the Russian army, leaving Olga alone with Bertha, who had since been discharged from hospital. However, increasingly, Olga decided to change her identity. As she remarked in interview in 1995:

I felt it was dangerous to stay a Jew. I didn’t hear anything special that happened to Jews (killing, etc.), but I knew that it was a danger.

Olga approached an engineer in the company in which she worked, a man called Yehuda Eismann. He had a female Russian co-worker with contacts in the underground. Through these contacts, Olga received three papers of authentication (including a birth certificate and a Kennkarte or ID card) and was transformed into a Polish Catholic with a new name. She memorised Christian customs and prayers, many of which she was familiar with from her time attending Catholic school. However, everyone at the firm still knew her as Jewish, so she had to change work location for safety’s sake. She resigned from her job, took a new position at a different workplace in Lwów and started her new life.

In early 1942, having been alerted to arrests of suspected Jews, Olga saw a chance to relocate to Kraków and to work there as a bookkeeper for a film company that imported and reproduced UFA (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft) films from Germany for redistribution in the greater Reich. She wrote her application in good German and was immediately accepted. On arrival in Kraków, Olga produced her new identity papers and references from her second place of employment in Lwów and moved into accommodation with a generous and pleasant elderly couple named Czerniewski. Relationships in the office were very good and the head of the bookkeeping department, a Silesian Volksdeutscher (ethnic German) named Kantor, was a caring and thoughtful manager.

In Kraków, the only Jewish people that Olga knew were relatives by the name of Szor, who were protected from incarceration in the ghetto through their Turkish citizenship. One day, they came to let her know that her friend Bertha was incarcerated in a ghetto in the town of Niepołomice, just 20 km to the east. Olga went to find her but could not access her directly. Later, having heard of the liquidation of this ghetto, Olga went to find her and found out that she had been taken to the slave-labour camp of Płaszów. The camp had a reputation for its cruelty and Olga was initially frightened to go there, so she asked a co-worker to come with her, confecting a story about rescuing her sister-in-law. The Ukrainian guards allowed them to pass through the gates and she managed to find Bertha, who was wearing the compulsory Jewish star. With a deft hand, under cover of darkness, Olga snipped the star off. She and her co-worker smuggled Bertha out, carefully sandwiched between them. When, in 1995, the Shoah Visual History interviewer asked Olga why she had taken this enormous risk, she explained simply that she had no peace and could not stand the situation of her friend being imprisoned.

Olga assisted Bertha in manufacturing an identity card, through a friend of her brother, Leon Moldauer, and so Jewish Bertha became known as Catholic Basia. Olga also organised papers for another co-worker, as well as her landlords from Lwów, the Kornreichs, who became the Kornackis. All of this took place tacitly with the approval of Olga’s hosts, the Czerniewskis, who even assisted Mr Kornacki when he fell sick with tuberculosis.

After some time, the Szors approached Olga for papers to travel onward, in order to leave Kraków. When she arrived late at night at the flat, the Gestapo were there, waiting. The flat had been under surveillance. Olga was interrogated about her religion and she had to pray a Christian prayer. Because of the lateness of the raid, the Gestapo decided to detain all prisoners in an interim gaol for suspected Jews. For a week she was questioned, her belongings confiscated, and she was asked to pray Christian prayers again, in front of a Jewish collaborator named Shapiro. She refused to do this and was sent back to the cell. Finally, after she had been detained for over two weeks, the Gestapo learned that she was working for the film company and released her back into its care, warning that if she had contact with Jews again she would not be released.

Preserving Holocaust Memory as the Last Survivors Vanish

An interview with the curators of the Ghetto Fighters’ Museum, the first Holocaust museum founded by Holocaust survivors.

At the end of 1942, Olga took up an offer from the company to work in its Warsaw office. After the imprisonment episode in Kraków, she again felt it safer to move somewhere more anonymous, so in early 1943 she travelled by train to the Polish capital. These were the dying months of the Warsaw Ghetto, but Olga heard little about what was happening; her identity was not compromised, and she lived in Mr Czerniewski’s brother’s flat, working as a bookkeeper. Life in Warsaw was becoming increasingly dangerous, even for hidden Jews, with daily denunciations; on this basis she made the decision to escape to Czechoslovakia, via Kraków.

Together with a paid guide (a contact through the Szors), a large group of Jews, including Olga, Basia (Bertha), their friend Alla and the editor of the songbook, Yehuda Eismann, made the perilous journey south-east at the end of 1943. At the town of Mikulášová (Mikolasz), the group were arrested as illegal migrants and imprisoned in a local school. Local Slovak Jews learned of the group and discreetly informed the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, who organised payments and bribe money for the entire group. This allowed them to travel on to Budapest, which was still relatively safe at this point, under the Horthy fascist dictatorship. Registered as Polish refugees, they received subsidy from the Polish government in exile. In Budapest, Olga found lodgings with a cousin and enrolled in the Conservatorium to study violin, with piano as a second instrument. As Polish citizens under false papers, the cohort remained relatively free, but the October takeover by the virulently antisemitic Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi saw increased threat, with subsidies cut off to all refugees. The Russian bombardment of Budapest in December and January convinced Olga to flee again. Her cousin in Budapest had parents living in Bucharest and, encouraged by her friend Yehuda Eismann, the pair decided to travel to the Romanian capital.

Bucharest was relatively quiet in early 1945. There was little remaining of German activity in the capital, Romania having gone over to the Allied side in August 1944. The Association of Polish Jewish Refugees had already been established by the time the pair arrived and it was at its offices at Calea Mosilor 128 that Yehuda Eismann established an office for the documentation of German atrocities against the Jews, where he and Olga began recording over 1,000 Protokollen – juridical testimonies from survivors about personal wartime experiences. There were three typists in the office and Olga was charged with transcribing the Polish Protokollen. She initially did so in shorthand but then typed them up. In her Shoah testimony, Olga commented that all the originals eventually were deposited at Yad Vashem (Document Archives, Jerusalem), but there is no evidence from our research to suggest that the originals are housed there. However, facsimiles of the typed copies are held at the Pinchas Lavon Labor Institute in Tel Aviv, which we did access. Many of those who gave testimonies remembered songs from their time in ghettos, in hiding, in partisan groups or in camps, and these too were compiled by Yehuda Eismann (alongside the Protokollen), eventually becoming Mima’amakim. Three of the contributors to this songbook, Mosze Iosef Fajgenbaum, Volf Sambol and Feyge Gurman, provided Protokollen, to which we refer in subsequent song biographies.

By 1945, Olga had heard nothing of her family for years, but while in Bucharest she finally received word from a cousin in Switzerland who had kept up a correspondence with her brother and parents. Her father had passed away in August 1944, but her mother survived in southern Russia; her brother was working as an engineer, also in Russia. In 1945, just prior to her departure on a ship to Palestine, she learned that they were on their way back to Poland and so she gave up her place on the ship and remained in Europe, returning to Poland via Budapest. She lived in Wrocław until 1946, when she married Jan S. They moved to Katowice and she kept her Polish forename ‘because we didn’t intend to go anywhere, we didn’t have permission to go elsewhere, so we authorised the name and I lived under my Catholic pseudonym’. The couple’s first child was born in September 1947. Two years after the birth of their last child, the family received a permit to visit London. In 1958, they were sponsored by a cousin of the Szor family, who helped them locate a flat.

Olga spoke of her wartime experiences to her children but only once they were adults. Her granddaughter asked for permission to record her testimony for a history project a year prior to the Shoah Visual History recording. This was the first recording Olga made of her war experience. In speaking about revisiting this personal trauma, she commented in the Shoah interview:

I really didn’t experience the whole horror of the Holocaust, but I did fight for my life. Since […] I wrote this testimony, it is living with me all the time. I still think about it, regret some things – mostly when I was overworked as a mother (in Poland) and working professionally in Katowice, I never came to Kraków to visit the Cerniewskis. I regret that to this day – they were righteous people.

Olga carried two historically important items with her on her journey to Australia. The first was a collection of facsimile testimonies of the Protokollen that she had gathered with Yehuda Eismann in Bucharest, which she donated to the Sydney Jewish Museum in the 1990s. The second, never shared with others during her lifetime, was the little songbook that we republish here. When asked about why she kept the testimonies, she answered:

They meant to me a lot. I wanted to come to them again, to study what had happened. I didn’t go through the horrors that others went through.

Either deliberately or in a less overtly conscious manner (we will never know), Olga preserved the songbook with a desire to revisit the melodies and words within. Towards the end of her life she reverted to her given first name. Her passion for music remained throughout her life. By sandwiching the fragile acid paper between other sheets of musical manuscript and keeping it in a cupboard in the far corner of her lounge, she ensured that generations after will continue to explore the songs and question the place of human creativity and its relationship to all life’s circumstances.

Excerpted with permission from Out of the Depths: The First Collection of Holocaust Songs, by Joseph Toltz and Anna Boucher. Copyright © 2025 by Joseph Toltz and Anna Boucher, and published by Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.