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Cultural Ghettoization and Theater during the Holocaust: Performance as a Link to Community
Independent Scholar, Bloomington, IN
Even under the most severe circumstances, the production of culture and art continues. This article focuses on the theater sustained by inmates within ghettos and camps during Germany’s Nazi regime (1933–45) and examines the paradox of performance in ghettoized contexts. Further, this research draws attention to questions of repertoire and censorship, as well as connections between theater, identity, and privilege. Creative expression was significant for both performers and their audience in the struggle for survival.
1. I would like to thank the directors of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, for sponsoring the two-week workshop "Culture within Ghetto Settings: Europe 1933–1945" and the public panel presentation that I organized in August 2001.
I use the term "ghettoized" to refer to situations in which citizens were separated from the majority of their communities by means of laws, intimidation, or physical barriers.
2. For example, Terezín’s cultural department arranged "leisure time" activities and procured materials for play productions. Meanwhile, at Westerbork, Kommandant Albert Konrad Gemmeker ensured that his cabaret stars had costumes and painted stage sets for their stage.
3. In concentration camps established for political prisoners during the early 1930s, such as Börgermoor and Sachsenhausen, some prisoners developed a temporary group for making all kinds of art. See Wolfgang Langhoff, Die Moorsoldaten: 13 Monate Konzentrationslager (Zurich: Schweizer Spiegel, 1935).
4. An example was "the painters’ affair" at Terezín, in which several painters were incarcerated and tortured in the "Little Fortress" after smuggling art out of the ghetto. See Anne D. Dutlinger, ed., Art, Music, and Education as Strategies for Survival: Theresienstadt, 1941–45 (New York: Herodias, 2001).
5. Chaim Kaplan writes on November 2, 1940, in his Warsaw diary: "It is difficult to write but I consider it an obligation and am determined to fulfill it. ... I will write a scroll of agony in order to remember the past in the future" (Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan [New York: Macmillan, 1965], 218). Among Yiddish-language pages recovered at Auschwitz-Birkenau were notes written on January 3, 1945, by Abraham Levite (who established a literary journal at Auschwitz): "But we, too, want to construct our own image of how one ‘lived’ in Auschwitz ... : to describe what a normal average day’s work in the camp looked like. A day that is a jumbled snarl of life and death, terror and hope, resignation and the will to live." See "A Yiddish Text from Auschwitz: Critical History and the Anthological Imagination," trans. David Suchoff, Prooftexts 19 (1999), 63–64.
6. It should be stressed that the very term "theater art" implies a communal experience because an audience member is always present. The term also must be understood to encompass libretti and scripts (staged or read aloud), puppet shows, skits, recitations of poetry, and song. Pre–World War II theater culture in Eastern and Western Europe, as well as within Nazi-occupied Europe, incorporated these art forms. Prisoners sang and recited prewar music-hall songs and poetry in Westerbork, Terezín, and other concentration camps. Max Rodriguez Garcia, for example, reports that he sang popular cabaret songs at Auschwitz I during 1944 (audio interview, 15 July 1999, San Francisco; he confirms this in a subsequent videotaped interview, 17 July 2000, San Francisco). See also Rebecca Rovit, "A Concert of Words: Theatrical Performance at Auschwitz," in The Last Expression: Art and Auschwitz, ed. David Mickenberg and Corinne Granof (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 305–11. Much of the Yiddish-language theater repertory of the vortkinstler ("spoken-word artist")—from 
ód
, Vilna, and Warsaw, for example—continued in the ghettos and transit camps, and reached beyond the displaced persons’ camps, to survive with émigrés. See Samy Feder, "The Yiddish Theater of Belsen," Belsen (Tel Aviv: Irgun Sheerit Hopleita Me’ Haezor Habriti, 1957), 135–39), reprinted in Rebecca Rovit and Alvin Goldfarb, eds., Theatrical Performance during the Holocaust: Texts, Documents, Memoirs (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 156–58. See also Arnold Zable, Wanderers and Dreamers: Tales of the David Herman Theatre (South Melbourne, Australia: Hyland House, 1998).
7. Despite the tensions that existed within the Zionist contingent and among those who viewed themselves as "assimilated," the theater brought a community together in the cultural ghetto created within Nazi Germany’s Jüdischer Kulturbund. This can be said of the Vilna ghetto theater as well. But at Westerbork, the camp authorities pitted the Dutch inmates against the German ones, with the cabaret often at the center of the conflict. See the memoir by Philip Mechanicus, Year of Fear: A Jewish Prisoner Waits for Auschwitz, trans. Irene S. Gibbons (New York: Hawthorn, 1964). The privileged status of actors at Westerbork and in Terezín caused resentment among some potential audiences.
8. See for example Raul Hilberg’s seminal work, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), and his Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York: Aaron Asher, 1992). Among others, see Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
9. A pathbreaking study in the visual arts was Janet Blatter and Sybil Milton, eds., Art of the Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 1981). Milton defines the term in her "Postscript: The Remnants of Culture under Duress," in Rovit and Goldfarb, Theatrical Performance, 287. Sadly, Blatter and Milton’s book is now out of print. See also Mary S. Costanza, ed., The Living Witness: Art in the Concentration Camps and Ghettos (New York: Free Press, 1982) for more on the visual arts. Recent studies include David G. Roskies, ed., The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988). Lilian Karina and Marion Kant’s study of dance in the Third Reich, Tanz unterm Hakenkreuz: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Henschel, 1996), has been translated by Jonathan Steinberg as Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich (New York: Berghahn, 2003). See also Guido Fackler on music in the camps: "Des Lagers Stimme"—Musik im KZ: Alltag und Häftlingskultur in den Konzentrationslagern 1933 bis 1936 (Bremen: Temmen, 2000). See also contributions on the fine arts by curators such as Anne Dutlinger (Art, Music, and Education as Strategies for Survival); Pnina Rosenberg, Salon des Refusés: Art in French Internment Camps (Beit Lohamei Haghetaot: Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum, 2000) [Salon ha-mesoravim: Omanut be-mahanot be-Tsarfat 1939–1945]; and Mickenberg and Granof, The Last Expression: Art and Auschwitz. Among more general studies on the role of art in survival are Thomas Rahe, "Musik, Literatur und Kunst in Bergen Belsen," in Frauen in Konzentrationslagern: Bergen-Belsen und Ravensbrück, ed. Claus Füllberg-Stolberg (Bremen: Temmen, 1994), 193–206; Christoph Daxelmüller, "Kulturelle Formen und Aktivitäten als Teil der Überlebens- und Vernichtungsstrategie in den Konzentrationslagern," in Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager: Entwicklung und Struktur, ed. Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth, and Christoph Dieckmann, vol. 2 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1998), 983–1005.
10. Understandably, scholars have used caution when approaching this topic. More common in the literature are studies focusing on issues of representation and memory in the post-Holocaust years. See for example, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); in theater studies, see Claude Schumacher, ed., Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
11. John London, "Le Théatre pendant L’Holocauste," Le Théatre Juif: Perspectives, Revue de l’université Hébraique de Jérusalem 10 (2003), 228; my translation.
12. Postscript to Rovit and Goldfarb, Theatrical Performance, 291. Milton’s research has provided scholars in the performing arts with a basis for acknowledging the importance of creative expression by inmates.
13. To this end, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum I led a two-week workshop with seven other international arts scholars and historians on culture in ghetto settings (see note 1). Northwestern University’s recent touring art exhibition "The Last Expression: Art and Auschwitz" (2002–3), related symposia, and publications brought arts scholars into a successful collaboration with those who research killing centers (see Mickenberg and Granof, Last Expression). Collaborators included archivists from Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as arts scholars and historians.
14. This is evident from the archived holdings of the prisoner and songwriter Aleksander Kulisiewicz, who collected songs from camps such as Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen; he recorded many of these after the war. This mostly Polish-language collection includes music, notebooks, correspondence, and drawings by prisoners. The collection, "Polskie Pie
ni Obozowe, 1939–1945" (Polish Concentration Camp Songs) is on microfiche at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), RG 55.002–003 M; see especially, RG.003*133, "Pami
tnik teatralny" (Theater Diary). Today’s artists also collaborate to revive the vibrancy of art created under duress. Tony Kushner and Maurice Sendak’s most recent picture book revives the children’s opera Brundibár, composed in Prague in 1941 and performed over fifty times at Theresienstadt. See Brundibár, Michael di Capua Books/ Hyperion, 2003. Also see "Humor," New York Times, October 28, 2003.
15. In an entry dated 20 January 1942, Herman Kruk declared his allegiance to an association established to support artistic creation in the ghetto and protect the work of deported writers and artists. See Kruk, "Diary of the Vilna Ghetto," YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Studies 13 (1965). Kruk’s diary has been newly translated and annotated in its entirety (that is, as much of it as was preserved) in The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944, ed. Benjamin Harshav, trans. Barbara Harshav (New Haven: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2002), 177. Emanuel Ringelblum and his Warsaw colleagues also established a secret ghetto archive, called Oneg Shabbat.
16. Their theatrical participation was at various times illegal, tolerated, or officially sanctioned (Garcia interviews). See also Max Rodriguez Garcia, As Long As I Remain Alive (Tuscaloosa, AL: Portals, 1979).
17. For example, living conditions at the main camp in 1943 contrasted dramatically with those at Birkenau in fall 1944 (unless one worked in a privileged Kommando).
18. See note 14 on the Kulisiewicz Collection.
19. Many sources address the ambiguous relationship of Jewish Germans to German society. See among others Jacob Katz, Emancipation and Assimilation: Studies in Modern Jewish History (Farnborough, UK: Gregg International, 1972); Peter Freimark, Alice Jankowski, and Ina S. Lorenz, eds., Juden in Deutschland: Emanzipation, Integration, Verfolgung, und Vernichtung (Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1991); Marion Berghahn, German-Jewish Refugees in England: The Ambiguities of Assimilation (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984); Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg, eds., The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985).
20. Another result of the preservation of culture from the Holocaust is that is shows us how the Nazis exploited culture for propaganda purposes. At Theresienstadt, for example, the German authorities used art to deceive the International Red Cross. Today, preserved footage from the Nazi-sponsored propaganda film on the resettlement of Jews is one of the sources used to demonstrate that culture in the camps was subverted to the Germans’ purposes.
21. In "Art Framed by Extremity: The Anomaly of Terezín as Example" (unpublished manuscript, 2003), Anne Dutlinger examines cultural influences on visual artists and identifies a solidarity and collaboration within the arts community at Terezín.
22. Conversation with Mascha Benya-Matz (née Benyakonsky), 9 May 2001, New York.
23. Interview with Helen "Zippi" Tichauer, née Spitzer, 7 March 2001, New York.
24. Interview with David Rogow, 7 May 2001, New York. Max Garcia also links performance with being "transposed" at Auschwitz (Garcia interviews).
25. Entry of 10 August 1942, in Kruk, "Diary of the Vilna Ghetto," 38. Rogow, a master vortkinstler from Vilna, performed in a variety theater until World War II broke out; he then performed in the Soviet Union with the Minsk Yiddish State Theater of Belorussia. Rogow was one of the first to revive Yiddish theater art when he toured DP camps in Austria and Germany in 1946. Some of his troupe members had performed in ghettos and camps.
26. This is apparent from documents from the Kulturbund archives located in the Academie der Künste (hereafter, AdK), Berlin. See also Josef Taussig’s theater criticism from within Theresienstadt, "Über die Theresienstädter Kabaretts," in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente (Prague: Theresienstädter Initiative, 1994), 214–26; and memoirs by surviving performers such as Max R. Garcia and Leo Klüger, Lache, denn morgen bist Du tot: Eine Geschichte vom Überleben, trans. Verena Reichel (Swedish) (Munich: Piper, 1998).
27. For a report on theater activity in Vilna that month, see "Cultural Activities in the Vilna Ghetto, March 1942," reprinted in Rovit and Goldfarb, Theatrical Performance, 136–37. Within Kruk’s chronicles, see "Theater Life," 9 October 1942, in Harshav, Last Days, 377–78.
28. Terezín archives are housed at Prague’s Jewish Museum and at Pamatník Terezín (Terezín Memorial National Cultural Monument). Photographs of "amusements for the ghetto elite" by German army reporters in the Warsaw ghetto may be useful supplementary documents if viewed in the proper context. See Ulrich Keller, ed., The Warsaw Ghetto in Photographs: 206 Views Made in 1941 (New York: Dover, 1984), photos no. 63–74, pp. 39–48.
29. Leo Kok’s designs are part of the art collection in the museum division at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. On theater in Westerbork, see Dirk Mulder and Ben Prinson, eds., Lachen in het donker: Amusement in Kamp Westerbork (Westerbork Cahiers, no. 4) (Hooghalen: Herrinnerungscentrum Kamp Westerbork, 1996).
30. One can trace these performers’ professional careers from Weimar Germany through the Third Reich and the Holocaust period as some of them move from camp to camp.
31. This was the case at Ravensbrück (interview with Anise Postel-Vinay, 28 March 1998, Paris).
32. Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 187–88. She later directed a production of Molière’s Imaginary Invalid at Auschwitz’s Raisko subcamp (December 1943). See Rovit, "Concert of Words," 112.
33. At about the same time that the Kulturbund came into existence, the Nazis established within Germany camps for political prisoners (many of whom were not Jewish). Prisoners at Oranienburg, Dachau, and Börgermoor engaged in cultural activities including cabaret. On music in the camps, see Fackler, Lagers Stimme. See also reports reprinted in Rovit and Goldfarb, Theatrical Performance; and the Kulisiewicz Collection (see note 14).
34. The Nazis effectively removed all Jews from government employment with the passage of the Civil Service Law. The first to be dismissed from their jobs were "civil servants who [were] not of Aryan ancestry." Later, an implementation order defined anyone with a Jewish parent or grandparent as non-Aryan. See Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, & Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 106.
35. Gemeindeblatt (Berlin) 18 August 1934. See note 19 on assimilation.
36. See Singer, CV-Zeitung, 28 September 1933.
37. Benya-Matz interview in Rovit and Goldfarb, Theatrical Performance, 62.
38. As an exception, she sang in Hebrew in the 1938 opera The Pioneers, in a performance at a synagogue.
39. Many lines are cut from the Haman-Creon dialogue in the Kulturbund script (AdK, 8–27.264).
40. Stefan Zweig, Jeremiah (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1928), 184–89. AdK, 8–27.265: "One can kill men, but not the God who lives within them. One can vanquish a people, but never its spirit"; See my "Jewish Theater: Repertory and Censorship in the Jüdischer Kulturbund, Berlin" in Theatre under the Nazis, ed. John London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 200.
41. See Jonas Turkov, "Latvia and Auschwitz" in Rovit and Goldfarb, Theatrical Performance, 114.
42. This was in July 1942, directed by Walter Freund. See Erich Weiner, "Freizeitgestaltung in Theresienstadt," in Rovit and Goldfarb, Theatrical Performance, 217.
43. Herbert Freeden, "Jüdischer Kulturbund ohne ‘Jüdische’ Kultur," Geschlossene Vorstellung: Der Jüdische Kulturbund, 1933–1941, ed. Akademie der Künste (Berlin: Hentrich, 1992), 65–66.
44. This was true of the Vilna and Warsaw ghettos, for example. Within Gurs, the French internment camp, Jewish and other "undesirable" artists were permitted to exhibit their paintings and drawings. Pnina Rosenberg has written on this in "Art of the Undesirables" (manuscript, 2003). [L’art des indésirables: l’art visuel dans les camps français.(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003)]; "Mickey Mouse in Gurs: Graphic Novels in a French Internment Camp," Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 6 (3), 272–293 (2002).
45. In Warsaw, three Polish-language theaters and two Yiddish-language ones were permitted. See Isaiah Trunk, "Religious, Educational, and Cultural Problems in the Eastern European Ghettos under German Occupation," YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Studies 14 (1965), 183.
46. According to Moshe Fass, this led the Judenrat to favor the musical revue over drama. See Fass, "Theatrical Activities in the Polish Ghettos during the Years 1939–1942" in Rovit and Goldfarb, Theatrical Performance, 108.
47. Ibid., 102–3; See also Gustavo Corni on Turkow (Turkov) in "The Jewish Ghettos in Eastern Europe: Culture under Siege (1939–1944)" (Unpublished manuscript, 2003), 27, regarding the conflict between Judenräte and the so-called grassroots activities of Jewish groups regarding the cultural and recreational aspects of ghetto life. Corni’s book Hitler’s Ghettos: Voices from a Beleagured Society, 1939–1944 (London: Arnold, 2002) is an excellent source on the ghettos themselves.
48. See entry of 24 August 1996, in Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 348–49. Hillesum refers to two of the German cabaret artists as Gemmeker’s privileged "court jesters." her reports reflect a general ambivalence about the theatrical programs, as do reports by Philip Mechanicus.
49. This was also the case in the Warsaw and ód ghettos. See week of 21 April 1942, "The Report of a ‘Jewish Informer’ in the Warsaw Ghetto—Selected Documents," Yad Vashem Studies 17 (1986), 270. See also Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the ód Ghetto, 1941–1944, trans. Richard Lourie et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
50. Entry of 29 September 1942 in Kruk, Last Days, 368. See also the entry for 11 October 1942, 377–78. The same passage is translated as follows in Kruk, "Diary of the Vilna Ghetto," 42: "In preparation is a revue titled You Never Can Tell, which, patently, has relevance to our precarious times."
51. Kruk, Last Days, 378. See also Solon Beinfeld, who cites Ghetto-News, 3–4 in Museum of Tolerance Online Multimedia Learning Center Multimedia Learning Center, Annual 1, Chapter 1, "The Cultural Life of the Vilna Ghetto,"www.motlc.wiesenthal.com.
53. Interview with Zdenka Fantlóva, March 1998, London. See also Fantlóva’s memoir, My Lucky Star, trans. Deryck Viney (New York: Herodias, 2001).
54. See Rebecca Rovit, "A Carousel of Theatrical Performance at Theresienstadt," in Dutlinger, Art, Music, and Education, 122–43. The German- and Czech-language theater groups were separate cultural communities.
55. See Klaus Leist, "Philipp Manes: A Theresienstadt Chronicle," Journal of Holocaust Education 6, no. 2 (1997), 51.
56. For more details and an English-language translation of the Kien libretto, see Aaron Kramer, "Creation in a Death Camp," in Rovit and Goldfarb, Theatrical Performance, 179–89. The libretto is on pages 252–64.
57. See Lex van Weren, "The Trumpeter of Auschwitz" (unpublished manuscript, Amsterdam, 1989), trans. Max R. Garcia, 8.
58. See entry of 27 April 1942, in Kruk, Last Days, 271. The Vilna ghetto rank and file took their seats at the premiere theater performance in a special order: "the Judenrat, the police commissioners, Avrom Siedschnur, the engineers, leaders of the Technical Department, and also ... writers, artists. ... "
59. Jonas Turkow, "Teater un Konsertn in di Getos un Konstentratsye Lagern," in Yidisher Teater in Yirope tsvishn beyde velt-milkhomes: Poyln, vol. 1 (New York: Knight, 1968), 506.
60. They also benefited because Potashinski belonged to the camp resistance at Buna-Monowitz. See Zable, Wanderers and Other Dreamers.
61. At Terezín, the preferential treatment of artists often allowed them to procure better housing, including the much sought-after "kumbal," or private room. Some Yiddish players at Auschwitz had protection from their room elders. See Rovit, "Concert of Words."
62. This held true for visual artists and musicians as well.
63. See Barbara Felsmann and Karl Prümm, Kurt Gerron—Gefeiert und Gejagt, 1897–1944: Das Schicksal eines deutschen Unterhaltungskünstlers: Berlin, Amsterdam, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz (Berlin: Hentrich, 1992).
64. Ibid., 17. Auschwitz I refers to the main camp (Stammlager), not to be confused with Birkenau (Auschwitz II), or Buna-Monowitz (Auschwitz III).
65. Cited in Eike Geisel and Henryk Broder, eds., Premiere und Pogrom: Der Jüdische Kulturbund, 1933–1941, Texte und Bilder (Berlin: Siedler, 1992), 103–4.
66. My translation. The photo is also housed at Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Sammlung Jüdischer Kulturbund (SJK), Spira.
67. Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 264–71, especially 267; Volker Kühn, "Laughter at the Edge of the Abyss," in Rovit and Goldfarb, Theatrical Performance, 55–57.
68. Entry of 24 August 1943, Hillesum, Interrupted Life, 348–49. It is clear from survivors’ testimonies that such preferred treatment did not go unnoticed by other inmates.
69. Gerron’s age (he was fifty-nine) was a disadvantage. Adult inmates under forty had a much better chance of survival, regardless of their skills.
70. Garcia interview, audiotape, 15 July 1999, San Francisco. Sofsky writes that prisoners who attended theater presentations could "encode" the protest "between the lines" (Order of Terror, 150).
71. Pulawer had been the managing director of ód’s prewar Yiddish Art Theater "Ararat" and later of the Avant-garde Revue Ghetto Theater.
72. Moshe Pulawer, Geven iz a geto (There Was a Ghetto) (Tel Aviv: Y. L. Perets-bibliotek, 1963), 85–86. Pulawer performed at concentration and labor camps through 1946. "Kanada" refers to the barracks area, close to the crematoria, reserved for sorting the plundered goods from deportees. For more on Pulawer and Yiddish actors, see Rovit, "Concert of Words."
75. Pulawer, Geven iz a geto, 85–86.
76. Ibid., 91. Pulawer places the word in quotation marks.
77. Benya-Matz, conversation with author, 9 May 2001, New York, New York.
79. Garcia interview, 17 July 2000, videotape. San Francisco. Garcia and van Weren nonetheless benefited from their arranged performances. So did Camilla Spira and Kurt Gerron at Westerbork and Terezín. As they pursued self-preservation, their craft became a commodity.
81. The term "Mokummer" refers to a person who was born in Amsterdam; "Mokum," as Mr. Garcia understands it, is a Hebrew word meaning "the city" (Email correspondence of 9 August 2005 with Garcia).
83. Borowski, born in 1922, had proven his appeal as a poet in the Polish underground before his arrest in Warsaw and subsequent imprisonment in the Pawiak prison, Birkenau, Natzweiler, and Dachau-Allach. He wrote "On the Way to Tipperary" in winter 1945. He survived the war but committed suicide in 1951. The poem has been anthologized in Selected Poems, trans. Tadeusz Pióro with Larry Rafferty and Meryl Natchez (Walnut Creek, CA: Hit & Run, 1990), 62–63. Reproduction permission courtesy of Larry Rafferty. Reproduced on the Internet at http://hunzal.tripod.com/borowski/dachau.html.