Tales of the Viennese Jews: 22, Eva (Geiringer) Schloss (1929-2026), stepsister of Anne Frank

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Patrick Comerford

Most people of my generation read Anne Frank’s Diary in our teenage years, and I remember how read it over a few days as a 14-year-old during the summer months on the beach in Ballinskelligs, Co Kerry, 60 years ago.

Perhaps this explains, in part, why I paid special attention to news reports in recent days of the death of Eva Schloss (formerly Eva Geiringer), a Holocaust survivor, educator and bestselling author, who was a step-sister of Anne Frank and a co-founder of the Anne Frank Trust UK.

I began this occasional blog series, ‘Tales of the Viennese Jews,’ in November 2019. I last returned to that series almost a year ago (7 February 2025), when I told the stories of Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025), the archetypal ‘wild child’ of the 1960s, of her brave battle for recovery from addiction and against cancer, and of her mother, Eva Hermine von Sacher-Masoch (1912-1991), a self-styled baroness who resisted the Nazis in Austria. My previous posting in this series had been the story of Max Perutz (18 May 2021).

The Tales from the Vienna Woods is a waltz by the composer Johann Strauss II (1825-1899), written more than a century and a half ago in 1868. Although Strauss was baptised in the Roman Catholic Church, he was born into a prominent Jewish family. Because the Nazis had a particular penchant for Strauss’s music, they tried to conceal and even deny the Strauss family’s Jewish identity.

However, the stories of Vienna’s Jews cannot be hidden, and many of these stories are told in the exhibits in the Jewish Museum in its two locations, at the Palais Eskeles on Dorotheergasse and in the Misrachi-Haus in Judenplatz.

Rather than describe both museums in detail in one or two postings, I decided after a visit to Vienna to re-tell some of these stories through this series, celebrating a culture and a community whose stories should never be forgotten.

Eva Geiringer was born in Vienna on 11 May 1929 into a middle-class Jewish family, the daughter of Elfriede Markovits, known as Fritzi, and Erich Geiringer, a businessman. The family observed the main Jewish festivals and did not eat pork, but they were not orthodox.

Their lives changed overnight with the Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria, in 1938. After Eva’s older brother Heinz was beaten up at school because he was Jewish came home blood-soaked, the Geiringer family decided to leave Vienna and moved first to Brussels and then to Amsterdam.

Eva was 11 when the family arrived in Amsterdam in 1940. Anne Frank, who was a month younger, lived with her parents, Otto and Edith Frank, and her sister in the same block of flats in Merwedeplein: Anne lived at flat 37 and Eva at 46. They were not close, nor were they alike – Eva was athletic, while Anne was more interested in fashion, films and flirting.

When the Netherlands fell to the Nazis, they were forced to wear yellow stars. As life got worse, the two families found false papers and went into hiding, moving seven times in two years before ending up in an attic flat with a secret compartment behind a trapdoor.

While the Geiringer family were having breakfast on Eva’s 15th birthday, the Gestapo stormed in and marched them to their headquarters, where they were beaten before being sent from Westerbork to Auschwitz. Eva and her mother were separated from Eva’s father and brother, their heads were shaved and Eva was tattooed with the number A/5272.

Eva later recalled in detail the repeated humiliations, the starvation, the rats, beetles and lice, the brutal beatings, frostbite and diarrhoea, being forced to watch prisoners being hanged, and being forced to carry away dead bodies.

When Eva went to the hospital block in Birkenau with a high fever, she met her cousin from Prague, Minni, a nurse who interceded with Josef Mengele to save Fritzi, who had been selected for the gas chambers. Without Minni, neither Eva nor Fritzi would have survived.

When Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet army in January 1945, Eva and Fritzi returned to Amsterdam. There they learned that Eva’s brother Heinz had died in Mauthausen of exhaustion in April, after the forced march from Auschwitz, and that her father had died three days before the end of the war.

Eva returned to school but felt bitter, angry and depressed. Otto Frank, who had learned of the death of his wife Edith and his daughters Anne and Margot, began to get close to Fritzi, especially after the discovery and the publication of Anne’s diary in 1947. When they married in 1953, Otto became Eva’s stepfather and he gave her the Leica camera he had used to photograph Anne and Margot.

At Otto’s suggestion, Eva went to London to take a photography course. There she met Zvi Schloss, a Bavarian-born Israeli citizen. They married in 1952, became the parents of three daughters, and Eva opened an antiques shop in Edgware.

Eva and Fritzi were invited to the opening of the exhibition ‘Anne Frank and the World’ at the Mall Galleries in 1986. The event was chaired by Ken Livingstone, leader of the Greater London Council, who called on Eva to speak. She had never spoken publicly about her experiences before, but went on to speak at events throughout the UK and co-founded the Anne Frank Trust UK with Gillian Walnes Perry.

Eva lived with survivor’s guilt in relation to her brother Heinz. In 2016, she spoke in Tralee, Co Kerry, at an International Women’s Day event organised by the Kerry Businesswomen's Association and the Bon Secours Hospital. In 2017, she organised an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in London of 30 of his paintings she had retrieved from their hiding place in Amsterdam.

She seldom spoke in public about Anne Frank apart from quoting the her diary where she said ‘I still believe that deep down human beings are good at heart’, commenting: ‘I cannot help remembering that she wrote this before she experienced Auschwitz and Belsen.’ Her books included The Promise (2006) and the bestselling After Auschwitz (2013).

Eva Schloss was appointed MBE for her work with the Anne Frank Trust and other Holocaust charities. She became an Austrian citizen again in 2021. Her mother Fritzi died in 1998 and her husband Zvi died in 2016. Three years ago, she danced with King Charles when he visited the JW3 centre on Finchley Road in December 2022. Eva died on 3 January 2026 and is survived by their daughters, Caroline, Jacky and Sylvia, and five grandchildren.

‘I have worked very, very hard to change people’s attitudes,’ Eva Schloss once told the BBC. ‘Each person you convince not to be racist is a positive.’ She believed that ‘we need to learn to live with each other in harmony, to accept each other for who and what we are. We must learn the lesson that human differences actually enrich our lives. We should not be afraid of people who are different from us, but we need to embrace their faiths and ways of life so that we can give our children and future generations a safer life to live’.

As for Anne Frank, many of the observations in her diary seem so relevant to events playing out today. For example, she wrote: ‘Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. They’re allowed to take only a knapsack and a little cash with them, and even then, they’re robbed of these possessions on the way.

‘Families are torn apart; men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone … Everyone is scared … the end is nowhere in sight.’

When the Jon S Randall Peace Page on Facebook cited this quotation in June 2019, it was labelled ‘fake’ and denied and the page was suspended by Facebook for some time. Snopes, the online fact-check site, researched and investigated the quote, and verified it. Eventually, when the suspension was lifted, Jon S Randall cited another quotation from Anne Frank that was often quoted by Eva Schloss: ‘It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.’

May her memory be a blessing, זיכרונה לברכה‎

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎



Tales of the Viennese Jews:

1, the chief rabbi and a French artist’s ‘pogrom’

2, a ‘positively rabbinic’ portrait of an Anglican dean

3, portraits of two imperial court financiers

4, portrait of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis

5, Lily Renée, from Holocaust Survivor to Escape Artist

6, Sir Moses Montefiore and a decorative Torah Mantle

7, Theodor Herzl and the cycle of contradictions

8, Simon Wiesenthal and the café in Mauthausen

9, Leonard Cohen and ‘The Spice-Box of Earth’

10, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Jewish grandparents

11, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his Jewish librettist

12, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild and the railways in Vienna

13, Gustav Mahler and the ‘thrice homeless’ Jew

14, Beethoven at 250 and his Jewish connections in Vienna

15, Martin Buber and the idea of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship

16, Three Holocaust survivors who lived in Northern Ireland.

17, Schubert’s setting of Psalm 92 for the synagogue.

18, Bert Linder and his campaign against the Swiss banks.

19, Adele Bloch-Bauer and Gustav Klimt’s ‘Lady in Gold’.

20, Max Perutz, Nobel laureate and ‘the godfather of molecular biology’.

21, Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025) and her mother Eva Hermine von Sacher-Masoch (1912-1991)

22, Eva Geiringer Schloss (1929-2026), step-sister of Anne Frank

Greece pays tribute to the composer Mikis Theodorakis on his 100th birthday

‘My whole life is close to you’ … today celebrated the 100th birthday of the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis

Patrick Comerford

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis (1925-2021), one of the most influential composers in Greece, who was born 100 years ago on 29 July 1925.

A series of concerts, around the globe and throughout Greece this year are marking this centenary, with centenary celebrations paying tribute to Theodorakis, who would have turned 100 today. His work – from the Mauthausen Cycle to film scores to interpretations of Greek folk music and songs – has profoundly shaped and defined Greek music today.

Mikis Theodorakis, composer, conductor, and politician, was born on the island of Chios on 29 July 1925 and died in Athens almost four years ago on 2 September 2021.

As one of the most prominent figures in Greek music, Theodorakis is more relevant than ever and continues to resonate around the world. His music expresses his political values and fused his idealism and his commitment to freedom.

His scores for films such as Zorba the Greek and Electra, his interpretations of classical plays and drama, or his settings for the works of contemporary Greek poets such as Odysseas Elytis, Giorgos Seferis and Yiannis Ritsos, show how Theodorakis catches Greek cultural imaginations, combining Greek traditional music and classical composition, high art and popular culture.

In January 1968, 31 years after Seferis completed ‘Epiphany, 1937’, the composer Mikis Theodorakis conceived of it as a choral piece, Επιφάνια-Αβέρωφ (Epiphania-Averof), naming the cantata after the prison in central in Athens. He had been detained there since August 1967, after the colonels right-wing junta had seized power on 21 April 1967, and was denied the Christmas amnesty extended to many other political prisoners in December 1967.

Gail Holst’s book, Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music (Amsterdam, 1980), shows that for Theodorakis setting the entire ‘Epiphany, 1937’ to music was a tour de force, his own epiphanic moment in the junta’s jail cells.

Theodorakis worked on the poem as a cantata to be performed with the help of his fellow prisoners. Each evening, while other prisoners listened to the radio in a communal hall from 7:30 to 8:30, Theodorakis used the hour to train his choir of 10 prisoners.

The poem’s first-person-singular refrain Κράτησα τη ζωή μου (Kratêsa tê zôê mou) is translated into English by Keeley and Sherrard as ‘I’ve kept a rein on my life’. It could also be translated as ‘I’ve kept a hold on my life’. In this refrain, Theodorakis heard a multiplicity of voices, the universality of their utterance further enhanced by the composer’s preference for a mixed chorus of both men and women.

This recurring phrase throughout the main part of the poem struck Theodorakis’s sensitivity and curiosity. Seferis’s refrain creates a sense of monotony and repetition and at the same time the sense of one carrying something heavy.

Gail Holst’s book, Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music (1980), shows that for Theodorakis setting the entire ‘Epiphany, 1937’ to music was a tour de force, his own epiphanic moment in the junta’s jail cells.



The key figure in these concerts and events is Maria Farantouri, who worked closely with Theodorakis for many years and is the most important voice in his oeuvre. She is known for her powerful, soulful and sensitive voice, and she continues to captivate audiences with her interpretations of his work.

Her version of Το γελαστό παιδί (The Laughing Boy) celebrates the uprising in the Athens Polytechnic on 17 November 1973 that led to the downfall of the colonels within a year. The song, composed by Mikis Theodorakis, was first included on the soundtrack of the Costas-Garvas movie Z (1969), and was quickly linked with resistance to the junta.

For Greeks, it is a song about the death of so many young people killed resisting the regime. When the regime was toppled in 1974, Mikis Theodorakis and many singers organised a concert to celebrate the return of democracy to Greece, and Maria Farantouri sang one of the most touching songs of the time.

There was a palpable response when she intentionally changed the original reference to August to the month of November to honour the students killed in November 1973. The original Greek lyrics are by the poet Vassilis Rotas, but they are based on earlier poem by the Irish playwright Brendan Behan.

Some years ago, my friends Paddy Sammon, a former Irish diplomat once based in Athens, and Damian Mac Con Uladh, an Irish journalist from Ballinasloe now based in Corinth, have researched the Irish background to this great Greek classic of resistance to oppression. The original laughing boy in Brendan Behan’s poem is Michael Collins. Theodorakis adapted the Greek translation, and adapted it in the context of Grigoris Lambrakis, the pacifist activist killed by far-right extremists in Greece in the years before the colonels seized power.

Behan adapted the poem in his play The Hostage (1958). The play first came to the attention of Theodorakis while he was living in Paris, and he was inspired to compose a cycle of 16 songs in 1962 with Greek lyrics by Vasilis Rotas (1889-1977).

Rotas’s translation of The Hostage was staged in Athens in 1962 at a time when the Greek civil war was still a taboo topic and left-wing activity was under close police surveillance. The play became a way for people to identify with their struggle against a repressive regime.

Maria Farantouri went into exile after the coup in 1967, and sang this song at solidarity concerts across Europe. ‘It became a hymn not only for the Irish liberation movement, but also for every liberation movement in the world, and Greek democracy,’ she told an RTÉ documentary.

When the junta sent in tanks against protesting students at the Athens Polytechnic on 17 November 1973, killing at least 24 people over a number of days, Maria Farantouri added a couple of stanzas to the song, and changed the date from August to November, deliberately linking the song to that event.



At many of this year’s anniversary concerts, Maria Farantouri is accompanied by Tasis Christoyannis, a distinguished baritone singer, and Alkinoos Ioannidis, a versatile singer, composer and poet from Cyprus, whose style is a mix of folk, classical and rock and who brings a fresh, contemporary dimension to Theodorakis’ repertoire.

Other accompanying musicians and singers include Vassilis Lekkas, Myron Michaelidis, Manolis Mitsias, Yota Negka and Thanassis Voutsas. Their voices highlight the many dimensions of the musical legacy of Theodorakis, although he once said of his work: ‘I like to believe that the bulk of my work – from the simplest song to the most intricate symphonic composition – belongs to a single musical unity.’

The sound of bouzoukis, lutes, and the delicate santouri blend seamlessly with clarinet, violin, and intricately woven orchestral arrangements, creating a musical fusion of tradition and expressive artistry, full of passion and poetry.

‘The Ballad of Mauthausen’, the Holocaust cantata written by Iakovos Kambanellis and Mikis Theodorakis … Mauthausen was the last of the concentration camps to be liberated, on 3 May 1945

During these concerts, Farantouri sings from all periods of Theodorakis’s oeuvre. But the highlight on many evenings is The Ballad of Mauthausen.

Mauthausen was the last of the concentration camps to be liberated at the end of the Holocaust and World War II 80 years ago, on 3 May 1945. The Ballad of Mauthausen (Η Μπαλάντα του Μαουτχάουζεν) is a cantata written by the Greek playwright Iakovos Kambanellis (1922-2011) and Mikis Theodorakis 60 years ago in 1965. It is based on the experiences in Mauthausen of Kambanellis, who wrote four poems that Mikis Theodorakis set to music.

The book and the music were born in an incendiary political and cultural milieu in Greece. Two days after its first performance, all music by Theodorakis was banned from Greek state radio. Within two years, the military had seized power and the colonels silenced Theodorakis and many other voices for seven long years.

For the first time ever, the complete music of Zorba the Greek – the work that in many ways has become the musical soul of Greece – has been performed live, interpreted with the original instruments used in the 1964 recording.

The Oscar-winning film, based on a major work by Nikos Kazantzakis, first published in Greek in 1946 as Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas. Theodorakis wrote the score for the 1964 film that became, perhaps, the best-loved Greek film. It was one of my earliest introductions to Greek culture, music and literature.

Other features on programmes include selections from Odyssey (2006), Theodorakis’ final song cycle, set to the poetry of Kostas Kartelias, include pieces from Ta Lyrika (1976), with poetry by Tasos Livaditis, and Beatrice on Zero Street (1994), with poetry by Dionysis Karatzas – works that belong to the composer’s later lyrical period. The evening also include some of his most loved and well-known songs, drawn from earlier song cycles and set to the verses of great poets and lyricists.

The two concerts in the Megaron Moussikis in Thessaloniki (1 and 2 January) included Theodorakis’ ballet suite Greek Carnival. The two concerts in the Megaron Moussikis, Athens (16 and 17 February) included excepts from Pablo Neruda’s Canto General in its original orchestration for a 15-member ensemble and two choirs.

Two concerts in Xanthi (11 and 12 April) also marked the centenary of the birth of Manos Hadjidakis, when Maria Farantouri and Nikos Kypourgos, two of Manos Hadzidakis’ most important collaborators, discussed his music and his influence on modern Greek music.

A concert in the Pyrgos Vassilissis (Queen’s Tower) in Ilion (30 May) was dedicated to the 100 years since the founding of Ilion.

Other concert venues in Greece have included Chania (13 June) and Iraklion (14 June) in Crete; the Kallimarmaron Stadium in Athens (25 June); Thessaloniki (30 June and 1 July), where Maria Farantouri and Manolis Mitsias sang poems by the Andalusian poet Federico Garcia Lorca, set to music by Theodorakis and other composers; and Thessaly (19 July).

Concerts venues in Greece in the coming weeks include the island of Lefkada (8 August), the Ancient Theatre in Dion (11 August), the Little Theatre in ancient Epidaurus (16 August), Siviris in Chalkidiki (24 August), and Serres (7 September).

International venues so far this year have included a concert in Grand Pera in Istanbul (19 March), when Maria Farantouri was accompanied by the pianist Achilleas Gouastor in a programme that included poems by Kiki Demoula, set to music by Sakis Papademetriou, as well as songs by Theodorakis. There was a concert in Helsinki too on 27 March.

A concert in Bochum, Germany (9 May) included The Ballad of Mauthausen, with a reading and talk that also marked the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. International concerts later this year are taking place in Düsseldorf (11 October), Rotterdam (13 October) and Lucerne (31 October).

In his music, Theodorakis expressed his political values and fused his idealism and his commitment to freedom. I was in Crete at the time of his funeral, the island was immersed in three days of official mourning and I could see how people were deeply moved emotionally as they watched that funeral on television screens everywhere. In the week after his death, Theodorakis was described by a leading Greek newspaper, Kathimerini, as ‘Greece’s last enduring myth.’

A Greek cantata that marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen, the last concentration camp

‘The Ballad of Mauthausen’, the Holocaust cantata written by Iakovos Kambanellis and Mikis Theodorakis … Mauthausen was the last of the concentration camps to be liberated, on 3 May 1945

Patrick Comerford

The Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) commemorations next week mark Germany's unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945 and the end of all German military operations. Yom haShoah, the Jewish world’s annual day of remembrance of the Holocaust, was marked last week (24 April 2025). Wednesday marked the 80th anniversary of Ravenruck (30 April 1945), and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen was marked two weks earlier (15 April 1945).

This weekend also marks the liberation of the concentration camps at Mauthausen and Gusen. The last members of the SS fled the camps on 3 May 1945, and a US Army reconnaissance unit arrived in Gusen and Mauthausen on 5 May. On the following day, the US army finally liberated around 40,000 prisoners in the camps. In both camps they found the bodies of hundreds of detainees who had died in the days before liberation.

Mauthausen was the last of the concentration camps to be liberated at the end of the Holocaust. Mauthausen-Gusen was about 20 km east of Linz in Upper Austria. Unlike Auschwitz, it was not an extermination camp, but countless people were murdered and died there in horrific circumstances. There the Nazis forced their victims to work in a stone quarry, hauling large pieces of rock and stone up the ‘Stairs of Death’ along steep and uneven ramps.

The Jewish prisoners there included Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005), who is remembered for his tireless efforts to bring those responsible for the Holocaust to justice. He survived the Lwów ghetto, concentration camps in Janowska (1941-1944), Kraków-Płaszów (1944) and Gross-Rosen, a death march to Chemnitz, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Mauthausen (1945).

After World War II, Wiesenthal dedicated his life to tracking down and gathering information on fugitive Nazi war criminals so that they could be brought to trial. He played a role in capturing Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960. He died in Vienna at the age of 96 on 20 September 2005.

Other prisoners or detainees in Mauthausen included Jehovah’s Witnesses, Romanies and Spanish republicans. Between 240,000 and 320,000 people, including Jews, intellectuals, and people classified as political ‘undesirables,’ were murdered in Mauthausen.

The Greek playwright Iakovos Kambanellis, author of ‘Mauthausen’ … is regarded by many as the greatest Greek playwright of the 20th century

Over the past week, I have been listening once again to the words and the music of The Ballad of Mauthausen, a cantata written by Iakovos Kambanellis and Mikis Theodorakis 60 years ago in 1965, 20 years after the end of World War II.

The Ballad of Mauthausen (Η Μπαλάντα του Μαουτχάουζεν) is based on the experiences of the Greek playwright Iakovos Kambanellis (Ιάκωβος Καμπανέλλης, 1922-2011), who wrote four poems that Mikis Theodorakis (Μίκης Θεοδωράκης) set to music.

Kambanellis was a poet, playwright, screenwriter, lyricist, and novelist, best known as a screenwriter for films, including Stella (1955), directed by Michael Cacoyannis. It was first written the script as a play, Stella With the Red Gloves, based on Carmen, but was never produced on the Greek stage because of its sexual frankness. The film, shot in the streets of Athens, follows a singer (Melina Mercouri) who refuses to marry her lover and begins a passionate affair with a football player. The film made a star of Melina Mercouri and boosted Greek cinema’s international reputation.

Kambanellis was born on 2 December 1922 in Hora on the island of Naxos. He was forced to leave school at an early age and to find work after the family moved to Athens, but he continued his studies at an evening technical school. He was arrested in 1942 after attempting to flee Nazi-occupied Greece, and was sent to Mauthausen in Austria, where he spent the rest of World War II.

The ‘Stairs of Death’ in Mauthausen

Kambanellis owed his survival in Mauthausen to the protection of a philhellenic German prisoner who assigned him to the architectural drafting office, where additions to the camp were designed.

Mauthausen was the last of the concentration camps to be liberated in May 1945. Kambanellis was not a Jew, and he was free to return with the other Greek prisoners to Greece. But knowing there were Greek Jews who dreamed of reaching Palestine, he elected to stay on in the camp until the last Greek Jew left.

Interviewed later in life, he said: ‘I don’t want to make myself into a hero. What could I do? I saw the eyes of the sick, of the weak, of the abandoned; could I have said okay, fine, I’m leaving now? I was their friend.” He admitted he was deeply envious of them “because we all went back to an old world and we were scared of it. We couldn’t, after those three years, go back to the world of the past, of before the war. And they went to a new, virgin, country and started a new world in Palestine.’

On his return to Greece, Kambanellis began writing a newspaper column in Athens before turning to the theatre and film.

A recurring feature of his work is the use of multiple, often unexpected voices. He attributed this to the years he spent in Mauthausen, listening to the voices of nameless sufferers. His success as a writer seemed miraculous to him and perhaps contributed to his unique blend of realism and mysticism.

His most successful play, Our Grand Circus, was staged in 1973 at the height of the colonels’ dictatorship in Greece. Weaving history, myth, and the traditional shadow puppet theatre with folk motifs, the play ridicules the heroic view of Greek history favoured by the colonels, rewriting Greek history from a left-wing perspective.

By calling the performances a circus and transforming his bleak view of the regime and of Greek history into a series of amusing vignettes, he escaped the strict censorship of the time. Our Grand Circus broke all box-office records and made Kambanellis a popular symbol of resistance.

He wrote the scripts for about a dozen films and directed two of them. He died in Athens on 29 March 2011. He is regarded by many as the greatest Greek playwright of the 20th century.

Mauthausen, his only novel, is a memoir recalling his experiences in the concentration camp. It was first published 60 years ago in Athens in 1965 and has been translated into English and German. At the same time, he wrote the Mauthausen cantata with a setting by his close friend Mikis Theodorakis, when his publisher suggested that they publish their works together.

The book and the music were born in an incendiary political and cultural milieu in Greece. Two days after its first performance, all music by Theodorakis was banned from Greek state radio. Within two years, the military had seized power and the colonels silenced Theodorakis and many other voices for seven long years.

Kambanellis was inspired by a photograph of an unknown girl which he found in the camp and which he kept with him.

The memoir begins in the camp and the neighbouring villages in the weeks immediately after their liberation. The horrors the inmates have seen and have suffered are recalled by the author and the woman he falls in love with, a Lithuanian Jew, in merciless detail as the lovers exorcise their demons by revisiting the sites of the atrocities they witnessed. When the inmates are gradually repatriated, many of the Jews there wait to find a way to get to Palestine.



The best-known song of all, performed by Maria Farantouri, is the first song, Άσμα Ασμάτων (Asma Asmaton, ‘Song of Songs’), which opens with the words:

Τι ωραία που είν’ η αγάπη μου
με το καθημερνό της φόρεμα
κι ένα χτενάκι στα μαλλιά.
Κανείς δεν ήξερε πως είναι τόσο ωραία.

‘My love, how beautiful she is in her everyday dress’.

This first song recalls the poignant questioning of a man who describes how beautiful his beloved is and asks the other inmates if they have seen her. They tell him they have seen her on a long march, standing on large square with a number on her arm and a yellow star on her heart. Maria Farantouri hauntingly sings the repeated line: ‘No-one knows how beautiful my beloved was.’<’br />
This song maintains the poetic structure of the Biblical Song of Songs, until the chilling line, coming as if in response to ‘have you seen him whom my soul loves,’ echoes with the question: ‘Young girls of Mauthausen, Young girls of Belsen, Have you seen my love?’ and the answer ‘We saw her in the frozen square, A number in her white hand And a yellow star on her heart.’



The second song, O Αντώνης (O Antonis, ‘Adonis’) is also known from the score of the film Z. This song tells the story of a Jew who collapses on the ‘Stairs of Death’ at the base of the quarry and is shot by the guard who then orders the Greek prisoner Antonis to lift a double burden or he too will be shot.

Antonis lifts this second rock and defiantly walks on with it. In this song we also hear the stairs being depicted in the introduction to every couplet.



The third song, Ο Δραπέτης (O Drapetis, The Fugitive), is the story of a prisoner who escapes the camp but cannot find refuge in the hostile surroundings. He is captured again and is shot.

The introduction to this song depicts the landscape of Austria with a Mozart-like melody.



In the last song, Όταν τελειώσει Ο Πόλεμος (Otan Teliossi O Polemos, When the War Ends), the poet addresses one of the girls he sees standing by the fence of the female camp and asks whether they can come together when the war is finally over, kiss at the gate, make love in the quarry and in the gas chamber until the shadow of death is driven away.

The song ends with an epilogue, returning to the first song and ending with the plaintive words that no-one knows how beautiful my beloved was.

The instrumentation includes bouzoukis, spinet, electric guitar, baglamas, flute, bass and percussion, all helping to create a desolate yet beautiful atmosphere.

Greek popular music in the 1960s became known all over the world thanks to the scores by two composers in particular, Manos Hadjidakis and Mikis Theodorakis, for two popular movies, Never on Sunday and Zorba the Greek. Both worked in the laika tradition of Greek popular music influenced by European melodic form. Each had his own muse or angel in a female singer who interpreted his music – for Hadjidakis she was Nana Mouskouri, for Theodorakis she was Maria Farandouri.

The recording of The Ballad of Mauthausen marked the beginning of one of the most fruitful collaborations in Greek music. Mikis Theodorakis discovered the singer Maria Farantouri when she was a 16-year-old young singer. He is said to have told her at the time: ‘You will be my high priestess.’ Her unique dramatic voice and style complements his music, and it is so productive a partnership that it has lasted for half a century.

Listening to The Ballad of Mauthausen, it is difficult to grasp that this is the voice of a teenager who has just left school, for she sings with a raw force and energy that reaches into the heart and soul with intensity.

Farandouri and Theodorakis had a life-long musical collaboration, intensified by their shared political activism. This album is both a classic and the high point of that collaboration.

Farandouri’s voice is a marvel of depth and beauty, and the songs are among the best by Theodorakis. The power and majesty of his music combined and the soaring beauty of her voice make The Ballad of Mauthausen a profound testament to the power of human resistance to tyranny and oppression.



The most accessible recording by Maria Farantouri (Μαρία Φαραντούρη) is complemented by a cycle of six songs for Farantouri, named ‘Farantouri’s Cycle’:

5, Κουράστηκα να σε κρατώ (Kourastika na se Krato, ‘I Am Tired of Holding Your Hand’).

6, Ο ίσκιος έπεσε βαρύς (O Iskios Epesse Varis, ‘The Shadow is so heavy’).

7, Πήρα τους δρόμους τ' ουρανού (Tous Thromous T’Ouranou, ‘I Took to the Streets of Heaven’).

8, Στου κόσμου την ανηφοριά (Stou Kosmou Tin Aniforya, ‘The Uphill Road’).

9, Το Εκκρεμές (To Ekremes, ‘The Pendulum’).

10, Τ' όνειρο καπνός (Tóniro Kapnos, ‘Dreams Go up in Smoke’).

The Ballad of Mauthausen is a difficult poem to read and a difficult cantata to listen to, and yet is compelling.

It is difficult to realise how a poet could be inspired to write about love in the all-encompassing atmosphere of evil and death in a concentration camp.

Yet this is the dream of love, and love is the way a great soul not only survives such terror, but finds meaning and triumphs over it.

A sketch by Simon Wiesenthal in Mauthausen for ‘Café As’ … part of a recent exhibition in the Jewish Museum, Vienna (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Άσμα Ασμάτων

Τι ωραία που είν’ η αγάπη μου
με το καθημερνό της φόρεμα
κι ένα χτενάκι στα μαλλιά.
Κανείς δεν ήξερε πως είναι τόσο ωραία.

Κοπέλες του Άουσβιτς,
του Νταχάου κοπέλες,
μην είδατε την αγάπη μου;

Την είδαμε σε μακρινό ταξίδι,
δεν είχε πια το φόρεμά της
ούτε χτενάκι στα μαλλιά.

Τι ωραία που είν’ η αγάπη μου,
η χαϊδεμένη από τη μάνα της
και τ’ αδελφού της τα φιλιά.
Κανείς δεν ήξερε πως είναι τόσο ωραία.

Κοπέλες του Μαουτχάουζεν,
κοπέλες του Μπέλσεν,
μην είδατε την αγάπη μου;

Την είδαμε στην παγερή πλατεία
μ’ ένα αριθμό στο άσπρο της το χέρι,
με κίτρινο άστρο στην καρδιά.

Τι ωραία που είν’ η αγάπη μου,
η χαϊδεμένη από τη μάνα της
και τ’ αδελφού της τα φιλιά.
Κανείς δεν ήξερε πως είναι τόσο ωραία.

Ο Αντώνης

Εκεί στη σκάλα την πλατιά
στη σκάλα των δακρύων
στο Βίνερ Γκράμπεν το βαθύ
το λατομείο των θρήνων

Εβραίοι κι αντάρτες περπατούν
Εβραίοι κι αντάρτες πέφτουν,
βράχο στη ράχη κουβαλούν
βράχο σταυρό θανάτου.

Εκεί ο Αντώνης τη φωνή
φωνή, φωνή ακούει
ω καμαράντ, ω καμαράντ
βόηθα ν’ ανέβω τη σκάλα.

Μα κει στη σκάλα την πλατιά
και των δακρύων τη σκάλα
τέτοια βοήθεια είναι βρισιά
τέτοια σπλαχνιά είν’ κατάρα.

Ο Εβραίος πέφτει στο σκαλί
και κοκκινίζει η σκάλα
κι εσύ λεβέντη μου έλα εδω
βράχο διπλό κουβάλα.

Παίρνω διπλό, παίρνω τριπλό
μένα με λένε Αντώνη
κι αν είσαι άντρας, έλα εδώ
στο μαρμαρένιο αλώνι.

Ο Δραπέτης

Ο Γιάννος Μπερ απ’ το βοριά
το σύρμα δεν αντέχει.
Κάνει καρδιά, κάνει φτερά,
μες στα χωριά του κάμπου τρέχει.

«Δώσε, κυρά, λίγο ψωμί
και ρούχα για ν’ αλλάξω.
Δρόμο να κάνω έχω μακρύ,
πάν’ από λίμνες να πετάξω.»

Όπου διαβεί κι όπου σταθεί
φόβος και τρόμος πέφτει.
Και μια φωνή, φριχτή φωνή
«κρυφτείτε απ’ τον δραπέτη.»

«Φονιάς δεν είμαι, χριστιανοί,
θεριό για να σας φάω.
Έφυγα από τη φυλακή
στο σπίτι μου να πάω.»

Α, τι θανάσιμη ερημιά
στου Μπέρτολτ Μπρεχτ τη χώρα.
Δίνουν το Γιάννο στους Ες Ες,
για σκότωμα τον πάνε τώρα.

Όταν τελειώσει Ο Πόλεμος

Κορίτσι με τα φοβισμένα μάτια
κορίτσι με τα παγωμένα χέρια,
άμα τελειώσει ο πόλεμος
μη με ξεχάσεις.

Χαρά του κόσμου, έλα στην πύλη
να φιληθούμε μες στο δρόμο
ν’ αγκαλιαστούμε στην πλατεία.

Κορίτσι με τα φοβισμένα μάτια
κορίτσι με τα παγωμένα χέρια,
άμα τελειώσει ο πόλεμος
μη με ξεχάσεις.

Στο λατομείο ν’ αγαπηθούμε
στις κάμαρες των αερίων
στη σκάλα, στα πολυβολεία.

Κορίτσι με τα φοβισμένα μάτια
κορίτσι με τα παγωμένα χέρια,
άμα τελειώσει ο πόλεμος
μη με ξεχάσεις.

Έρωτα μες στο μεσημέρι
σ’ όλα τα μέρη του θανάτου
ώσπου ν’ αφανιστεί η σκιά του.

Κορίτσι με τα φοβισμένα μάτια
κορίτσι με τα παγωμένα χέρια,
άμα τελειώσει ο πόλεμος
μη με ξεχάσεις.

The Song of Songs

How beautiful she is, my love
in her everyday dress
and the little comb on her hair
Nobody ever knew that she is so beautiful

Girls of Auschwitz
Dachau’s girls
have you seen by chance my love?

We saw her leaving on a long voyage
she was no longer wearing her dress
nor a little comb on her hair.

How beautiful she is, my love
the one pampered by her mother
and her brother’s kisses
Nobody ever knew that she is so beautiful

Girls of Auschwitz
Dachau’s girls
have you seen by chance my love?

We saw her in the frigid town square
with a number stamped on her white hand
with a yellow star pinned by her heart

How beautiful she is, my love
the one pampered by her mother
and her brother’s kisses
Nobody ever knew that she is so beautiful

Adonis

There on the wide staircase
the staircase of tears
in Wiener Graben’s deep stone-
quarry of cries and lamentation

Jews and partisans stroll by
Jews and partisans fall down
a rock they carry on their back
a rock a burden cross of death

There comes Adonis and a voice
a voice, a voice he hears
oh comrade, oh comrade,
help me to climb these stairs

But there on the wide staircase
that staircase of tears
such help is taken as insult
such a compassion is a curse

The Jewish man falls on the step
and red bleeds through the staircase
and you young lad come over here
a double rock you’ll carry

A double rock I’ll take, a triple
my name, they call me Adonis
come and meet me if you are a man
at the marble threshing circle.

The Fugitive

Janos Ber from the North
can’t stand the barbed wire.
He takes heart, takes wing
runs through the villages of the valley.

Ma’am, give me a piece of bread
and clothes to change into –
I have a long way to go
and lakes to fly across.

Wherever he goes or stops
fear and terror strike
and a cry, a terrible cry:
Hide from the fugitive!

Christians, I’m no murderer,
no beast come to eat you.
I left the prison
to go back to my home.

Ah, what deathly loneliness
in this land of Berthold Brecht!
They hand Janos over to the SS
They’re taking him, now, to be killed.

When the War is Over

Girl with the weeping eyes,
Girl with the frozen hands.
Forget me not when the war is over.

Joy of the world. come to the gate
So that we could embrace in the street.
So that we could kiss in the square.

So that we could make love in the quarry.
In the gas chambers,
On the staircase, in the observation post.

Love in the middle of noon
In all the corners of death
’Til its shadow will be no more.

Girl with the weeping eyes,
Girl with the frozen hands.
Forget me not when the war is over.

• Maria Farantouri, who is on a tour marking the 100th anniversary of the death of Mikis Theodorakis, is taking part in a concert in Schauspielhaus in Bochum, Germany next Friday (9 May 2025). The programme that includes ‘The Ballad of Mauthausen’, other songs, readings and a talk. The concert marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, and she is accompanied by the pianist Henning Schmiedt.

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎

The Greeks have a word for it (21) Holocaust

‘The Ballad of Mauthausen’ … the Holocaust cantata by Mikis Theodorakis, who was buried in Chania today

Patrick Comerford

I am in Rethymnon in Crete, and for the past week I have been writing on my blog about words in the English language that are borrowed from Greek.

On this Friday evening (10 September 2021), Shabbat Shuvah, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, my choice of word is Holocaust.

The word Holocaust comes from the Ancient Greek ὁλόκαυστος (holokaustos), which, in turn, is derived from ὅλος (‘whole’) and καυστός (‘burnt’), used for one of the major forms of sacrifice also known as a burnt offering.

The word Holocaust was later used in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible, to refer to the olah (עלה‎), the communal and individual sacrificial burnt offerings in the Temple in Jerusalem. In time, its Latin form, holocaustum, was first used with specific reference to a massacre of Jewish people by the chroniclers Roger of Howden and Richard of Devizes in England in the 1190s.

But the Holocaust of the 20th century was not a sacrifice by the Nazis to God, and the 6 million Jews burned to death and murdered in the death camps were not burnt offerings. The former Regius Professor of History a Cambridge, Sir Richard J Evans, wrote in 1989 that the term Holocaust is unsuitable and should not be used.The Biblical word Shoah (שואה), meaning ‘calamity’ in Hebrew, has become the standard Hebrew term for the 20th-century Holocaust since the early 1940s.

Iakovos Kambanellis, author of ‘Mauthausen’ … is regarded by many as the greatest Greek playwright of the 20th century

All this week, the news in Greece has been dominated by the funeral of the composer Mikis Theodorakis (Μίκης Θεοδωράκης), who was buried today in his family’s home village near Chania. Television channels have been providing minute-by-minuted live coverage of the funeral and showing movies with music he composed, and restaurants here in Rethymnon have been playing his music and compositions constantly.

Theodorakis was the composer of the great Greek cantata of the Holocaust, The Ballad of Mauthausen. The poem was written by the Greek playwright and poet Iakovos Kambanellis and was set to music by Theodorakis in 1965, 20 years after the Holocaust.

The Ballad of Mauthausen (Η Μπαλάντα του Μαουτχάουζεν) is based on the experiences of Iakovos Kambanellis (1922-2011), who wrote four poems that Theodorakis set to music.

Kambanellis was a poet, playwright, screenwriter, lyricist, and novelist, best known as a screenwriter for films, including Stella (1955), directed by Michael Cacoyannis. It was first written the script as a play, Stella With the Red Gloves, based on Carmen, but was never produced on the Greek stage because of its sexual frankness. The film, shot in the streets of Athens, follows a singer (Melina Mercouri) who refuses to marry her lover and begins a passionate affair with a football player. The film made a star of Melina Mercouri and boosted Greek cinema’s international reputation.

Perhaps La Stella, the hotel where I am staying in Platanias, on the eastern fringes of Rethymnon, is named after Stella.

Kambanellis was born on 2 December 1922 in Hora on the island of Naxos. He had to leave school at an early age and to find work after the family moved to Athens. But he continued his studies at an evening technical school. He was arrested in 1942 after attempting to flee Nazi-occupied Greece, and was sent to Mauthausen in Austria, where he spent the rest of World War II.

The ‘Stairs of Death’ in Mauthausen

Unlike Auschwitz, Mauthausen was not an extermination camp, but countless people were murdered and died there in horrific circumstances. There the Nazis forced their victims to work in a stone quarry, hauling large pieces of rock and stone up the ‘Stairs of Death’ along steep and uneven ramps. The Jewish prisoners there included Simon Wiesenthal, along with Jehovah’s Witnesses, Romanies and Spanish republicans. Between 240,000 and 320,000 people, including Jews, intellectuals, and people classified as ‘political undesirables,’ were murdered in Mauthausen.

Kambanellis owed his survival to the protection of a Philhellenic German prison guard who assigned him to the architectural drafting office, where additions to the camp were designed.

Mauthausen was the last of the concentration camps to be liberated in May 1945. Kambanellis was not a Jew, and he was free to return with the other Greek prisoners to Greece. But knowing there were Greek Jews who dreamed of reaching Palestine, he elected to stay on in the camp until the last Greek Jew left.

Interviewed later in life, he said: ‘I don’t want to make myself into a hero. What could I do? I saw the eyes of the sick, of the weak, of the abandoned; could I have said okay, fine, I’m leaving now? I was their friend.’ He admitted he was deeply envious of them ‘because we all went back to an old world and we were scared of it. We couldn’t, after those three years, go back to the world of the past, of before the war. And they went to a new, virgin, country and started a new world in Palestine.’

On his return to Greece, Kambanellis began writing a newspaper column in Athens before turning to the theatre and film.

A recurring feature of his work is the use of multiple, often unexpected voices. He attributed this to the years he spent in Mauthausen, listening to the voices of nameless sufferers. His success as a writer seemed miraculous to him and perhaps contributed to his unique blend of realism and mysticism.

His most successful play, Our Grand Circus, was staged in 1973 at the height of the colonels’ dictatorship. Weaving history, myth, and the traditional shadow puppet theatre with folk motifs, the play ridicules the heroic view of Greek history favoured by the colonels, rewriting Greek history from a left-wing perspective.

By calling the performances a circus and transforming his bleak view of the regime and of Greek history into a series of amusing vignettes, he escaped the strict censorship of the time. Our Grand Circus broke all box-office records and made Kambanellis a popular symbol of resistance.

He wrote the scripts for about a dozen films and directed two of them. He died in Athens 10 years ago, on 29 March 2011. He is regarded by many as the greatest Greek playwright of the 20th century.

Mauthausen, his only novel, is a memoir recalling his experiences in the concentration camp. It was first published in Athens in 1965 and has been translated into English and German. At the same time, he wrote the Mauthausen Cantata with a setting by his close friend Theodorakis, when his publisher suggested that they publish their works together.

The book and the music were born in an incendiary political and cultural milieu in Greece. Two days after its first performance, all music by Theodorakis was banned from Greek state radio. Within two years, the military had seized power and the colonels silenced Theodorakis and many other voices for seven long years.

Kambanellis was inspired by a photograph of an unknown girl which he found in the camp and which he kept with him.

The memoir begins in the camp and the neighbouring villages in the weeks immediately after their liberation. The horrors the inmates have seen and have suffered are recalled by the author and the woman he falls in love with, a Lithuanian Jew, in merciless detail as the lovers exorcise their demons by revisiting the sites of the atrocities they witnessed. When the inmates are gradually repatriated, many of the Jews wait to find a way to get to Palestine.



The best-known song of all, performed by Maria Farantouri, is the first song, Άσμα Ασμάτων (Asma Asmaton, ‘Song of Songs’), which opens with the words:

Τι ωραία που είν’ η αγάπη μου
με το καθημερνό της φόρεμα
κι ένα χτενάκι στα μαλλιά.
Κανείς δεν ήξερε πως είναι τόσο ωραία.

‘My love, how beautiful she is in her everyday dress.’

This first song recalls the poignant questioning of a man who describes how beautiful his beloved is and asks the other inmates if they have seen her. They tell him they have seen her on a long march, standing on a large square with a number on her arm and a yellow star on her heart. Maria Farantouri hauntingly sings the repeated line: ‘No-one knows how beautiful my beloved was.’

This song maintains the poetic structure of the Biblical Song of Songs, until the chilling line, coming as if in response to ‘have you seen him whom my soul loves,’ echoes with the question: ‘Young girls of Mauthausen, Young girls of Belsen, Have you seen my love?’ and the answer ‘We saw her in the frozen square, A number in her white hand And a yellow star on her heart.’



The second song, O Αντώνης (O Antonis, ‘Adonis’) is also known from the score of the film Z. This song tells the story of a Jew who collapses on the ‘Stairs of Death’ at the base of the quarry and is shot by the guard who then orders the Greek prisoner Antonis to lift a double burden or he too will be shot.

Antonis lifts this second rock and defiantly walks on with it. In this song we also hear the stairs being depicted in the introduction to every couplet.



The third song, Ο Δραπέτης (O Drapetis, The Fugitive), is the story of a prisoner who escapes the camp but cannot find refuge in the hostile surroundings. He is captured again and is shot.

The introduction to this song depicts the landscape of Austria with a Mozart-like melody.



In the last song, Όταν τελειώσει Ο Πόλεμος (Otan Teliossi O Polemos, When the War Ends), the poet addresses one of the girls he sees standing by the fence of the female camp and asks whether they can come together when the war is finally over, kiss at the gate, make love in the quarry and in the gas chamber until the shadow of death is driven away.

The song ends with an epilogue, returning to the first song and ending with the plaintive words that no-one knows how beautiful my beloved was.

The instrumentation includes bouzoukis, spinet, electric guitar, baglamas, flute, bass and percussion, all helping to create a desolate yet beautiful atmosphere.

Greek popular music in the 1960s became known all over the world thanks to the scores by two composers in particular, Manos Hadjidakis and Mikis Theodorakis, for two popular movies, Never on Sunday (Ποτέ την Κυριακή) and Zorba the Greek. Both worked in the laika tradition of Greek popular music influenced by European melodic form. Each had his own muse or angel in a female singer who interpreted his music – for Hadjidakis she was Nana Mouskouri, for Theodorakis she was Maria Farandouri.

The recording of The Ballad of Mauthausen marked the beginning of one of the most fruitful collaborations in Greek music. Theodorakis discovered the singer Maria Farandouri when she was a 16-year-old young singer. He is said to have told her at the time, ‘You will be my high priestess.’ Her unique dramatic voice and style complements his music, and it is so productive a partnership that it has lasted for half a century.

Listening to The Ballad of Mauthausen, it is difficult to grasp that this is the voice of a teenager who has just left school, for she sings with a raw force and energy that reaches into the heart and soul with intensity.

Farandouri and Theodorakis had a life-long musical collaboration, intensified by their shared political activism. This album is both a classic and the high point of that collaboration.

Farandouri’s voice is a marvel of depth and beauty, and the songs are among the best by Theodorakis. The power and majesty of his music combined and the soaring beauty of her voice make The Ballad of Mauthausen a profound testament to the power of human resistance to tyranny and oppression.



The most accessible recording by Maria Farantouri (Μαρία Φαραντούρη) is complemented by a cycle of six songs for Farantouri, named ‘Farantouri’s Cycle’:

5, Κουράστηκα να σε κρατώ (Kourastika na se Krato, ‘I Am Tired of Holding Your Hand’).

6, Ο ίσκιος έπεσε βαρύς (O Iskios Epesse Varis, ‘The Shadow is so heavy’).

7, Πήρα τους δρόμους τ' ουρανού (Tous Thromous T’Ouranou, ‘I Took to the Streets of Heaven’).

8, Στου κόσμου την ανηφοριά (Stou Kosmou Tin Aniforya, ‘The Uphill Road’).

9, Το Εκκρεμές (To Ekremes, ‘The Pendulum’).

10, Τ' όνειρο καπνός (Tóniro Kapnos, ‘Dreams Go up in Smoke’).

The Ballad of Mauthausen is a difficult poem to read and a difficult cantata to listen to, and yet it is compelling.

It is difficult to realise how a poet could be inspired to write about love in the all-encompassing atmosphere of evil and death in a concentration camp.

Yet this is the dream of love, and love is the way a great soul not only survives such terror, but finds meaning and triumphs over it.

A sketch by Simon Wiesenthal in Mauthausen for ‘Café As’ … part of an exhibition in the Jewish Museum, Vienna (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Άσμα Ασμάτων

Τι ωραία που είν’ η αγάπη μου
με το καθημερνό της φόρεμα
κι ένα χτενάκι στα μαλλιά.
Κανείς δεν ήξερε πως είναι τόσο ωραία.

Κοπέλες του Άουσβιτς,
του Νταχάου κοπέλες,
μην είδατε την αγάπη μου;

Την είδαμε σε μακρινό ταξίδι,
δεν είχε πια το φόρεμά της
ούτε χτενάκι στα μαλλιά.

Τι ωραία που είν’ η αγάπη μου,
η χαϊδεμένη από τη μάνα της
και τ’ αδελφού της τα φιλιά.
Κανείς δεν ήξερε πως είναι τόσο ωραία.

Κοπέλες του Μαουτχάουζεν,
κοπέλες του Μπέλσεν,
μην είδατε την αγάπη μου;

Την είδαμε στην παγερή πλατεία
μ’ ένα αριθμό στο άσπρο της το χέρι,
με κίτρινο άστρο στην καρδιά.

Τι ωραία που είν’ η αγάπη μου,
η χαϊδεμένη από τη μάνα της
και τ’ αδελφού της τα φιλιά.
Κανείς δεν ήξερε πως είναι τόσο ωραία.

Ο Αντώνης

Εκεί στη σκάλα την πλατιά
στη σκάλα των δακρύων
στο Βίνερ Γκράμπεν το βαθύ
το λατομείο των θρήνων

Εβραίοι κι αντάρτες περπατούν
Εβραίοι κι αντάρτες πέφτουν,
βράχο στη ράχη κουβαλούν
βράχο σταυρό θανάτου.

Εκεί ο Αντώνης τη φωνή
φωνή, φωνή ακούει
ω καμαράντ, ω καμαράντ
βόηθα ν’ ανέβω τη σκάλα.

Μα κει στη σκάλα την πλατιά
και των δακρύων τη σκάλα
τέτοια βοήθεια είναι βρισιά
τέτοια σπλαχνιά είν’ κατάρα.

Ο Εβραίος πέφτει στο σκαλί
και κοκκινίζει η σκάλα
κι εσύ λεβέντη μου έλα εδω
βράχο διπλό κουβάλα.

Παίρνω διπλό, παίρνω τριπλό
μένα με λένε Αντώνη
κι αν είσαι άντρας, έλα εδώ
στο μαρμαρένιο αλώνι.

Ο Δραπέτης

Ο Γιάννος Μπερ απ’ το βοριά
το σύρμα δεν αντέχει.
Κάνει καρδιά, κάνει φτερά,
μες στα χωριά του κάμπου τρέχει.

«Δώσε, κυρά, λίγο ψωμί
και ρούχα για ν’ αλλάξω.
Δρόμο να κάνω έχω μακρύ,
πάν’ από λίμνες να πετάξω.»

Όπου διαβεί κι όπου σταθεί
φόβος και τρόμος πέφτει.
Και μια φωνή, φριχτή φωνή
«κρυφτείτε απ’ τον δραπέτη.»

«Φονιάς δεν είμαι, χριστιανοί,
θεριό για να σας φάω.
Έφυγα από τη φυλακή
στο σπίτι μου να πάω.»

Α, τι θανάσιμη ερημιά
στου Μπέρτολτ Μπρεχτ τη χώρα.
Δίνουν το Γιάννο στους Ες Ες,
για σκότωμα τον πάνε τώρα.

Όταν τελειώσει Ο Πόλεμος

Κορίτσι με τα φοβισμένα μάτια
κορίτσι με τα παγωμένα χέρια,
άμα τελειώσει ο πόλεμος
μη με ξεχάσεις.

Χαρά του κόσμου, έλα στην πύλη
να φιληθούμε μες στο δρόμο
ν’ αγκαλιαστούμε στην πλατεία.

Κορίτσι με τα φοβισμένα μάτια
κορίτσι με τα παγωμένα χέρια,
άμα τελειώσει ο πόλεμος
μη με ξεχάσεις.

Στο λατομείο ν’ αγαπηθούμε
στις κάμαρες των αερίων
στη σκάλα, στα πολυβολεία.

Κορίτσι με τα φοβισμένα μάτια
κορίτσι με τα παγωμένα χέρια,
άμα τελειώσει ο πόλεμος
μη με ξεχάσεις.

Έρωτα μες στο μεσημέρι
σ’ όλα τα μέρη του θανάτου
ώσπου ν’ αφανιστεί η σκιά του.

Κορίτσι με τα φοβισμένα μάτια
κορίτσι με τα παγωμένα χέρια,
άμα τελειώσει ο πόλεμος
μη με ξεχάσεις.

The Song of Songs

How beautiful she is, my love
in her everyday dress
and the little comb on her hair
Nobody ever knew that she is so beautiful

Girls of Auschwitz
Dachau’s girls
have you seen by chance my love?

We saw her leaving on a long voyage
she was no longer wearing her dress
nor a little comb on her hair.

How beautiful she is, my love
the one pampered by her mother
and her brother’s kisses
Nobody ever knew that she is so beautiful

Girls of Auschwitz
Dachau’s girls
have you seen by chance my love?

We saw her in the frigid town square
with a number stamped on her white hand
with a yellow star pinned by her heart

How beautiful she is, my love
the one pampered by her mother
and her brother’s kisses
Nobody ever knew that she is so beautiful

Adonis

There on the wide staircase
the staircase of tears
in Wiener Graben’s deep stone-
quarry of cries and lamentation

Jews and partisans stroll by
Jews and partisans fall down
a rock they carry on their back
a rock a burden cross of death

There comes Adonis and a voice
a voice, a voice he hears
oh comrade, oh comrade,
help me to climb these stairs

But there on the wide staircase
that staircase of tears
such help is taken as insult
such a compassion is a curse

The Jewish man falls on the step
and red bleeds through the staircase
and you young lad come over here
a double rock you’ll carry

A double rock I’ll take, a triple
my name, they call me Adonis
come and meet me if you are a man
at the marble threshing circle.

The Fugitive

Janos Ber from the North
can’t stand the barbed wire.
He takes heart, takes wing
runs through the villages of the valley.

Ma’am, give me a piece of bread
and clothes to change into –
I have a long way to go
and lakes to fly across.

Wherever he goes or stops
fear and terror strike
and a cry, a terrible cry:
Hide from the fugitive!

Christians, I’m no murderer,
no beast come to eat you.
I left the prison
to go back to my home.

Ah, what deathly loneliness
in this land of Berthold Brecht!
They hand Janos over to the SS
They’re taking him, now, to be killed.

When the War is Over

Girl with the weeping eyes,
Girl with the frozen hands.
Forget me not when the war is over.

Joy of the world. come to the gate
So that we could embrace in the street.
So that we could kiss in the square.

So that we could make love in the quarry.
In the gas chambers,
On the staircase, in the observation post.

Love in the middle of noon
In all the corners of death
’Til its shadow will be no more.

Girl with the weeping eyes,
Girl with the frozen hands.
Forget me not when the war is over.

Simon Wiesenthal was a prisoner in Mauthausen-Gusen … a portrait in the Jewish Museum, Vienna (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Meanwhile, this Shabbat, between Rosh Hashanah (last Monday) and Yom Kippur (beginning at sunset on Wednesday evening) is known as Shabbat Shuvah, or the Sabbath of return.

Repentance, is a core concept of the High Holy Days, and the services on this Sabbath, Shabbat Shuvah, have an emphasis on the themes of repentance and forgiveness. Sephardic Jews here in Greece read Hosea 14: 2-10 and Micah 7: 18-20, while Ashkenazi Jews read Hosea 14: 2-10 and Joel 2: 15-27. The selection from Hosea focuses on a universal call for repentance and an assurance that those who return to God will benefit from divine healing and restoration. Hosea focuses on divine forgiveness and how great it is in comparison to human forgiveness.

Shanah Tovah – a good and sweet New Year! – to you and to all yours

Shabbat Shalom

Yesterday: Rhapsody

Tomorrow: Hygiene

Tales of the Viennese Jews: 8, Simon Wiesenthal and the café in Mauthausen

A sketch by Simon Wiesenthal for ‘Café As’ in the Jewish Museum in Vienna (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

The Tales from the Vienna Woods is a waltz by the composer Johann Strauss II (1825-1899), written just over a century and a half ago, in 1868. Although Strauss was baptised in the Roman Catholic Church, he was born into a prominent Jewish family. Because the Nazis had a particular penchant for Strauss’s music, they tried to conceal and even deny the Jewish identity of the Strauss family.

However, the stories of Vienna’s Jews cannot be hidden, and many of those stories from Vienna are told in the exhibits in the Jewish Museum in its two locations, at the Palais Eskeles on Dorotheergasse and in the Misrachi-Haus in Judenplatz.

Rather than describe both museums in detail in one or two blog postings, I have decided over these few days or weeks to re-tell some of these stories, celebrating a culture and a community whose stories should never be forgotten.

Throughout the Jewish Museum on Dorotheergasse, many of the exhibits refer to the work and legacy of Simon Wiesenthal, and a current exhibition is devoted to his studies and art – until this month’s visit to Vienna, I had never thought of him as an artist.

Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005) was a Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer, who is closely identified with Vienna. He is remembered for his tireless efforts to bring those responsible for the Holocaust to justice. He was also a trained architect. But when I thought of Wiesenthal and Mauthausen in the past, I did not think of cafés and coffee, cake and croissants, and art.

The ‘Café As’ (‘Café Ace’) exhibition at the museum shows how the bright light of creativity and friendship can blossom in even the most trying of circumstances, and the coffeehouse drawings and plans by Simon Wiesenthal tells an implicit tale of survival and friendship.

Simon Wiesenthal was born on 31 December 1908 in Buczacz (Buchach), now in Ukraine but then in Galicia, a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He studied architecture at the Czech Technical University in Prague, then an important centre of modernism and functionalism.

He moved in 1932 to the Polytechnic University in Lviv (Lwów), then in Poland but now in Ukraine, and once an important city in the Austro-Hungarian empire. As well as working in an architectural practice, he also drew cartoons for a Zionist newspaper, Chwila, and for a satirical magazine, Omnibus.

He was living in Lviv at the outbreak of World War II. He survived the Lwów ghetto, concentration camps in Janowska (1941-1944), Kraków-Płaszów (1944) and Gross-Rosen, a death march to Chemnitz, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Mauthausen (1945).

By chance, Wiesenthal became friends in Mauthausen with the Polish writer, Edmund Staniszewski, a political prisoner who used a bureaucratic sleight of hand to keep Wiesenthal out of the gas chambers and also gave bread to his severely malnourished Jewish companion.

Staniszewski dreamt of opening a coffeehouse (‘Café As’) after the war, and his friend offered to design the building for him.

Even while he was still at Mauthausen, Wiesenthal began sketching out ideas using pens and paper ‘borrowed’ from the concentration camp offices. He worked on all aspects of the proposed café, much in the spirit of famous Viennese architects and designers like Wagner or Hoffmann, designing furniture, advertising, cake decorations, invitations, and even the uniforms of the waiting and kitchen staff.

In the weeks after the liberation of Mauthausen, Wiesenthal turned his sketches into dozens of detailed plans and drawings for Café As. Although Staniszewski never built his coffeehouse, he kept Wiesenthal’s drawings. These are now owned by the Jewish Museum and currently on display.

Selected drawings form the bulk of the present exhibition, with 80 drawings inviting visitors to wonder what might have been had Wiesenthal’s life taken a more innocent turn.

The drawings also provide another symbol of the triumph of perseverance, friendship and humanity in even the most difficult circumstances. And Café As looks like it might just have been the place where I would have found a fine double espresso.

The Café As exhibition also presents biographical details and examples of Wiesenthal’s talents with the pencil.

A section on his architecture studies includes exhibits such as his 1932 student report card from the Czech Technical University in Prague.

Some of Wiesenthal’s sketches of Mauthausen include the poignant ‘Transports,’ in which a giant skeletal SS officer swallows row after row of wagons full of people.

The exhibition also looks at his time immediately after the liberation of Mauthausen, when Wiesenthal worked with US army counter-intelligence. This includes a sweet letter to his wife Cyla anticipating their reunion.

After World War II, Wiesenthal dedicated his life to tracking down and gathering information on fugitive Nazi war criminals so that they could be brought to trial. He played a role in capturing Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960. He died in Vienna at the age of 96 on 20 September 2005 and was buried in Herzliya in Israel.

The Café As exhibition, curated by Michaela Vocelka, opened on 29 May 2019 and continues until Sunday 12 January 2020.

Simon Wiesenthal … a portrait in the Jewish Museum in Vienna (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Other postings in this series:

1, the chief rabbi and a French artist’s ‘pogrom’

2, a ‘positively rabbinic’ portrait of an Anglican dean

3, portraits of two imperial court financiers

4, portrait of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis

5, Lily Renée, from Holocaust Survivor to Escape Artist

6, Sir Moses Montefiore and a decorative Torah Mantle

7, Theodor Herzl and the cycle of contradictions

8, Simon Wiesenthal and the café in Mauthausen

9, Leonard Cohen and ‘The Spice-Box of Earth’

10, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Jewish grandparents

11, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his Jewish librettist

12, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild and the railways in Vienna

13, Gustav Mahler and the ‘thrice homeless’ Jew

14, Beethoven at 250 and his Jewish connections in Vienna

15, Martin Buber and the idea of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship

16, Three Holocaust survivors who lived in Northern Ireland.

17, Schubert’s setting of Psalm 92 for the synagogue.

18, Bert Linder and his campaign against the Swiss banks.

19, Adele Bloch-Bauer and Gustav Klimt’s ‘Lady in Gold’.

20, Max Perutz, Nobel laureate and ‘the godfather of molecular biology’.

‘The Ballad of Mauthausen’ tells how love prevails in the face of hatred and death

A distressed brother and sister cling to each other on the border of Greece and FYR Macedonia

Patrick Comerford

Over the past few days I have been distressed by images on television news and in every newspaper of the refugee crisis in Greece and other parts of southern Europe and the Mediterranean.

The images of frightened children clinging to each other or bewildered parents, and of vast numbers of people on railway tracks or being held back as razor wire is rolled out, or clambering onto overcrowded trains heading north from the Balkans to Austria or Germany all bring back haunting images of World War II and the concentration camps.

Have we failed to see the irony that this is all unfolding on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II?

This is happening on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II

In the day I am glimpsing flashing images of the concentration camps, and at night in my dreams I am asking over and over again what am I doing about this? Am I saying enough? Am I speaking out loud enough? Is anyone listening?

Who is listening to these children? Who hears their cries and sees the tears and the fear on their faces?

And over and over again, in my mind, in my dreams, I am hearing the words and the music of The Ballad of Mauthausen, a cantata written by Iakovos Kambanellis and Mikis Theodorakis 50 years ago in 1965, 20 years after the end of World War II.

The Greek playwright Iakovos Kambanellis, author of ‘Mauthausen’ … is regarded by many as the greatest Greek playwright of the 20th century

The Ballad of Mauthausen (Η Μπαλάντα του Μαουτχάουζεν) is based on the experiences of the Greek playwright Iakovos Kambanellis (Ιάκωβος Καμπανέλλης, 1922-2011), who wrote four poems that Mikis Theodorakis (Μίκης Θεοδωράκης) set to music.

Kambanellis was a poet, playwright, screenwriter, lyricist, and novelist, best known as a screenwriter for films, including Stella (1955), directed by Michael Cacoyannis. It was first written the script as a play, Stella With the Red Gloves, based on Carmen, but was never produced on the Greek stage because of its sexual frankness. The film, shot in the streets of Athens, follows a singer (Melina Mercouri) who refuses to marry her lover and begins a passionate affair with a football player. The film made a star of Melina Mercouri and boosted Greek cinema’s international reputation.

Kambanellis was born on 2 December 1922 in Hora on the island of Naxos. He was forced to leave school at an early age and to find work after the family moved to Athens, but continued his studies at an evening technical school. He was arrested in 1942 after attempting to flee Nazi-occupied Greece, and was sent to Mauthausen in Austria, where he spent the rest of World War II.

The ‘Stairs of Death’ in Mauthausen

Mauthausen-Gusen was about 20 km east of Linz in Upper Austria. Unlike Auschwitz, it was not an extermination camp, but countless people were murdered and died there in horrific circumstances. There the Nazis forced their victims to work in a stone quarry, hauling large pieces of rock and stone up the “Stairs of Death” along steep and uneven ramps. The Jewish prisoners there included Simon Wiesenthal, along with Jehovah’s Witnesses, Romanies and Spanish republicans. Between 240,000 and 320,000 people, including Jews, intellectuals, and people classified as political “undesirables,” were murdered in Mauthausen.

Kambanellis owed his survival in Mauthausen to the protection of a philhellenic German prisoner who assigned him to the architectural drafting office, where additions to the camp were designed.

Mauthausen was the last of the concentration camps to be liberated in May 1945. Kambanellis was not a Jew, and he was free to return with the other Greek prisoners to Greece. But knowing there were Greek Jews who dreamed of reaching Palestine, he elected to stay on in the camp until the last Greek Jew left.

Interviewed later in life, he said: “I don’t want to make myself into a hero. What could I do? I saw the eyes of the sick, of the weak, of the abandoned; could I have said okay, fine, I’m leaving now? I was their friend.” He admitted he was deeply envious of them “because we all went back to an old world and we were scared of it. We couldn’t, after those three years, go back to the world of the past, of before the war. And they went to a new, virgin, country and started a new world in Palestine.”

On his return to Greece, Kambanellis began writing a newspaper column in Athens before turning to the theatre and film.

A recurring feature of his work is the use of multiple, often unexpected voices. He attributed this to the years he spent in Mauthausen, listening to the voices of nameless sufferers. His success as a writer seemed miraculous to him and perhaps contributed to his unique blend of realism and mysticism.

His most successful play, Our Grand Circus, was staged in 1973 at the height of the colonels’ dictatorship. Weaving history, myth, and the traditional shadow puppet theatre with folk motifs, the play ridicules the heroic view of Greek history favoured by the colonels, rewriting Greek history from a left-wing perspective.

By calling the performances a circus and transforming his bleak view of the regime and of Greek history into a series of amusing vignettes, he escaped the strict censorship of the time. Our Grand Circus broke all box-office records and made Kambanellis a popular symbol of resistance.

He wrote the scripts for about a dozen films and directed two of them. He died in Athens on 29 March 2011. He is regarded by many as the greatest Greek playwright of the 20th century.

Mauthausen, his only novel, is a memoir recalling his experiences in the concentration camp. It was first published 50 years ago in Athens in 1965 and has been translated into English and German. At the same time, he wrote the Mauthausen cantata with a setting by his close friend Mikis Theodorakis, when his publisher suggested that they publish their works together.

The book and the music were born in an incendiary political and cultural milieu in Greece. Two days after its first performance, all music by Theodorakis was banned from Greek state radio. Within two years, the military had seized power and the colonels silenced Theodorakis and many other voices for seven long years.

Kambanellis was inspired by a photograph of an unknown girl which he found in the camp and which he kept with him.

The memoir begins in the camp and the neighbouring villages in the weeks immediately after their liberation. The horrors the inmates have seen and have suffered are recalled by the author and the woman he falls in love with, a Lithuanian Jew, in merciless detail as the lovers exorcise their demons by revisiting the sites of the atrocities they witnessed. When the inmates are gradually repatriated, many of the Jews wait to find a way to get to Palestine.



The best-known song of all, performed by Maria Farantouri, is the first song, Άσμα Ασμάτων (Asma Asmaton, “Song of Songs”), which opens with the words:

Τι ωραία που είν’ η αγάπη μου
με το καθημερνό της φόρεμα
κι ένα χτενάκι στα μαλλιά.
Κανείς δεν ήξερε πως είναι τόσο ωραία.

“My love, how beautiful she is in her everyday dress.”

This first song recalls the poignant questioning of a man who describes how beautiful his beloved is and asks the other inmates if they have seen her. They tell him they have seen her on a long march, standing on large square with a number on her arm and a yellow star on her heart. Maria Farantouri hauntingly sings the repeated line: “No-one knows how beautiful my beloved was.”

This song maintains the poetic structure of the Biblical Song of Songs, until the chilling line, coming as if in response to “have you seen him whom my soul loves,” echoes with the question: “Young girls of Mauthausen, Young girls of Belsen, Have you seen my love?” and the answer “We saw her in the frozen square, A number in her white hand And a yellow star on her heart.”



The second song, O Αντώνης (O Antonis, “Adonis”) is also known from the score of the film Z. This song tells the story of a Jew who collapses on the “Stairs of Death” at the base of the quarry and is shot by the guard who then orders the Greek prisoner Antonis to lift a double burden or he too will be shot.

Antonis lifts this second rock and defiantly walks on with it. In this song we also hear the stairs being depicted in the introduction to every couplet.



The third song, Ο Δραπέτης (O Drapetis, The Fugitive), is the story of a prisoner who escapes the camp but cannot find refuge in the hostile surroundings. He is captured again and is shot.

The introduction to this song depicts the landscape of Austria with a Mozart-like melody.



In the last song, Όταν τελειώσει Ο Πόλεμος (Otan Teliossi O Polemos, When the War Ends), the poet addresses one of the girls he sees standing by the fence of the female camp and asks whether they can come together when the war is finally over, kiss at the gate, make love in the quarry and in the gas chamber until the shadow of death is driven away.

The song ends with an epilogue, returning to the first song and ending with the plaintive words that no-one knows how beautiful my beloved was.

The instrumentation includes bouzoukis, spinet, electric guitar, baglamas, flute, bass and percussion, all helping to create a desolate yet beautiful atmosphere.

Greek popular music in the 1960s became known all over the world thanks to the scores by two composers in particular, Manos Hadjidakis and Mikis Theodorakis for two popular movies, Never on Sunday and Zorba the Greek. Both worked in the laika tradition of Greek popular music influenced by European melodic form. Each had his own muse or angel in a female singer who interpreted his music – for Hadjidakis she was Nana Mouskouri, for Theodorakis she was Maria Farandouri.

The recording of The Ballad of Mauthausen marked the beginning of one of the most fruitful collaborations in Greek music. Mikis Theodorakis discovered the singer Maria Farantouri when she was a 16-year-old young singer. He is said to have told her at the time: “You will be my high priestess.” Her unique dramatic voice and style complements his music, and it is so productive a partnership that it has lasted for half a century.

Listening to The Ballad of Mauthausen, it is difficult to grasp that this is the voice of a teenager who has just left school, for she sings with a raw force and energy that reaches into the heart and soul with intensity.

Farandouri and Theodorakis had a life-long musical collaboration, intensified by their shared political activism. This album is both a classic and the high point of that collaboration.

Farandouri’s voice is a marvel of depth and beauty, and the songs are among the best by Theodorakis. The power and majesty of his music combined and the soaring beauty of her voice make The Ballad of Mauthausen a profound testament to the power of human resistance to tyranny and oppression.



The most accessible recording by Maria Farantouri (Μαρία Φαραντούρη) is complemented by a cycle of six songs for Farantouri, named “Farantouri's Cycle”:

5, Κουράστηκα να σε κρατώ (Kourastika na se Krato, “I Am Tired of Holding Your Hand”).

6, Ο ίσκιος έπεσε βαρύς (O Iskios Epesse Varis, “The Shadow is so heavy”).

7, Πήρα τους δρόμους τ' ουρανού (Tous Thromous T’Ouranou, “I Took to the Streets of Heaven”).

8, Στου κόσμου την ανηφοριά (Stou Kosmou Tin Aniforya, “The Uphill Road”).

9, Το Εκκρεμές (To Ekremes, “The Pendulum”).

10, Τ' όνειρο καπνός (Tóniro Kapnos, “Dreams Go up in Smoke”).

The Ballad of Mauthausen is a difficult poem to read and a difficult cantata to listen to, and yet is compelling.

It is difficult to realise how a poet could be inspired to write about love in the all-encompassing atmosphere of evil and death in a concentration camp.

Yet this is the dream of love, and love is the way a great soul not only survives such terror, but finds meaning and triumphs over it.

Can love triumph in the present crisis?

Άσμα Ασμάτων

Τι ωραία που είν’ η αγάπη μου
με το καθημερνό της φόρεμα
κι ένα χτενάκι στα μαλλιά.
Κανείς δεν ήξερε πως είναι τόσο ωραία.

Κοπέλες του Άουσβιτς,
του Νταχάου κοπέλες,
μην είδατε την αγάπη μου;

Την είδαμε σε μακρινό ταξίδι,
δεν είχε πια το φόρεμά της
ούτε χτενάκι στα μαλλιά.

Τι ωραία που είν’ η αγάπη μου,
η χαϊδεμένη από τη μάνα της
και τ’ αδελφού της τα φιλιά.
Κανείς δεν ήξερε πως είναι τόσο ωραία.

Κοπέλες του Μαουτχάουζεν,
κοπέλες του Μπέλσεν,
μην είδατε την αγάπη μου;

Την είδαμε στην παγερή πλατεία
μ’ ένα αριθμό στο άσπρο της το χέρι,
με κίτρινο άστρο στην καρδιά.

Τι ωραία που είν’ η αγάπη μου,
η χαϊδεμένη από τη μάνα της
και τ’ αδελφού της τα φιλιά.
Κανείς δεν ήξερε πως είναι τόσο ωραία.

Ο Αντώνης

Εκεί στη σκάλα την πλατιά
στη σκάλα των δακρύων
στο Βίνερ Γκράμπεν το βαθύ
το λατομείο των θρήνων

Εβραίοι κι αντάρτες περπατούν
Εβραίοι κι αντάρτες πέφτουν,
βράχο στη ράχη κουβαλούν
βράχο σταυρό θανάτου.

Εκεί ο Αντώνης τη φωνή
φωνή, φωνή ακούει
ω καμαράντ, ω καμαράντ
βόηθα ν’ ανέβω τη σκάλα.

Μα κει στη σκάλα την πλατιά
και των δακρύων τη σκάλα
τέτοια βοήθεια είναι βρισιά
τέτοια σπλαχνιά είν’ κατάρα.

Ο Εβραίος πέφτει στο σκαλί
και κοκκινίζει η σκάλα
κι εσύ λεβέντη μου έλα εδω
βράχο διπλό κουβάλα.

Παίρνω διπλό, παίρνω τριπλό
μένα με λένε Αντώνη
κι αν είσαι άντρας, έλα εδώ
στο μαρμαρένιο αλώνι.

Ο Δραπέτης

Ο Γιάννος Μπερ απ’ το βοριά
το σύρμα δεν αντέχει.
Κάνει καρδιά, κάνει φτερά,
μες στα χωριά του κάμπου τρέχει.

«Δώσε, κυρά, λίγο ψωμί
και ρούχα για ν’ αλλάξω.
Δρόμο να κάνω έχω μακρύ,
πάν’ από λίμνες να πετάξω.»

Όπου διαβεί κι όπου σταθεί
φόβος και τρόμος πέφτει.
Και μια φωνή, φριχτή φωνή
«κρυφτείτε απ’ τον δραπέτη.»

«Φονιάς δεν είμαι, χριστιανοί,
θεριό για να σας φάω.
Έφυγα από τη φυλακή
στο σπίτι μου να πάω.»

Α, τι θανάσιμη ερημιά
στου Μπέρτολτ Μπρεχτ τη χώρα.
Δίνουν το Γιάννο στους Ες Ες,
για σκότωμα τον πάνε τώρα.

Όταν τελειώσει Ο Πόλεμος

Κορίτσι με τα φοβισμένα μάτια
κορίτσι με τα παγωμένα χέρια,
άμα τελειώσει ο πόλεμος
μη με ξεχάσεις.

Χαρά του κόσμου, έλα στην πύλη
να φιληθούμε μες στο δρόμο
ν’ αγκαλιαστούμε στην πλατεία.

Κορίτσι με τα φοβισμένα μάτια
κορίτσι με τα παγωμένα χέρια,
άμα τελειώσει ο πόλεμος
μη με ξεχάσεις.

Στο λατομείο ν’ αγαπηθούμε
στις κάμαρες των αερίων
στη σκάλα, στα πολυβολεία.

Κορίτσι με τα φοβισμένα μάτια
κορίτσι με τα παγωμένα χέρια,
άμα τελειώσει ο πόλεμος
μη με ξεχάσεις.

Έρωτα μες στο μεσημέρι
σ’ όλα τα μέρη του θανάτου
ώσπου ν’ αφανιστεί η σκιά του.

Κορίτσι με τα φοβισμένα μάτια
κορίτσι με τα παγωμένα χέρια,
άμα τελειώσει ο πόλεμος
μη με ξεχάσεις.

The Song of Songs

How beautiful she is, my love
in her everyday dress
and the little comb on her hair
Nobody ever knew that she is so beautiful

Girls of Auschwitz
Dachau’s girls
have you seen by chance my love?

We saw her leaving on a long voyage
she was no longer wearing her dress
nor a little comb on her hair.

How beautiful she is, my love
the one pampered by her mother
and her brother’s kisses
Nobody ever knew that she is so beautiful

Girls of Auschwitz
Dachau’s girls
have you seen by chance my love?

We saw her in the frigid town square
with a number stamped on her white hand
with a yellow star pinned by her heart

How beautiful she is, my love
the one pampered by her mother
and her brother’s kisses
Nobody ever knew that she is so beautiful

Adonis

There on the wide staircase
the staircase of tears
in Wiener Graben’s deep stone-
quarry of cries and lamentation

Jews and partisans stroll by
Jews and partisans fall down
a rock they carry on their back
a rock a burden cross of death

There comes Adonis and a voice
a voice, a voice he hears
oh comrade, oh comrade,
help me to climb these stairs

But there on the wide staircase
that staircase of tears
such help is taken as insult
such a compassion is a curse

The Jewish man falls on the step
and red bleeds through the staircase
and you young lad come over here
a double rock you’ll carry

A double rock I’ll take, a triple
my name, they call me Adonis
come and meet me if you are a man
at the marble threshing circle.

The Fugitive

Janos Ber from the North
can’t stand the barbed wire.
He takes heart, takes wing
runs through the villages of the valley.

Ma’am, give me a piece of bread
and clothes to change into –
I have a long way to go
and lakes to fly across.

Wherever he goes or stops
fear and terror strike
and a cry, a terrible cry:
Hide from the fugitive!

Christians, I’m no murderer,
no beast come to eat you.
I left the prison
to go back to my home.

Ah, what deathly loneliness
in this land of Berthold Brecht!
They hand Janos over to the SS
They’re taking him, now, to be killed.

When the War is Over

Girl with the weeping eyes,
Girl with the frozen hands.
Forget me not when the war is over.

Joy of the world. come to the gate
So that we could embrace in the street.
So that we could kiss in the square.

So that we could make love in the quarry.
In the gas chambers,
On the staircase, in the observation post.

Love in the middle of noon
In all the corners of death
’Til its shadow will be no more.

Girl with the weeping eyes,
Girl with the frozen hands.
Forget me not when the war is over.