Aleksander Kulisiewicz

Di Aleksander Kulisiewicz, scampato ai lager nazisti e raccoglitore di uno dei più importanti archivi di canti della deportazione europei, ho reperito la seguente biografia in lingua francese:

Alex Kulisiewicz est né en 1918 à Cracovie d’une famille d’origine tzigane. Il sait à peine lire que déjà il joue du violon, et à dix ans s’intègre à un orchestre professionnel. Mais un accident malheureux – il se brûle trois doigts de la main gauche – met un terme à sa carrière d’instrumentaliste. Il devient alors siffleur virtuose, spécialité très appréciée à l’époque, qui l’amène à se produire dans toutes les grandes villes d’Europe.

À la veille de la guerre, et parallèlement à son activité artistique il devient responsable de la presse au bureau de la « Fédération de la Jeunesse Démocratique » d’où il lance un prophétique appel à la paix. Il ne sera pas entendu.

1939. La guerre éclate. Les nazis occupent la Pologne. Kulisiewicz est arrêté comme agitateur et expédié au camp de concentration de Sachsenhausen. Il y restera jusqu’à la libération en 1945.

Six ans d’horreur. Entre autre, en 1943, dans le cadre de leurs « expériences scientifiques », les nazis pratiquent, sur Kulisiewicz, à plusieurs reprises, des injections de cultures diphtériques. Il faudra l’intervention clandestine des camarades médecins du « Revier » - « l’hôpital » du camp – pour en neutraliser le développement fatal.

Et Kulisiewicz tient bon. Il survivra pour témoigner. À la libération, sur son lit de l’hôpital de Cracovie, il dictera 716 pages de chants et de poèmes en quatre langues écrits dans les camps.

Depuis il ne cesse de grossir ce qui constitue les plus importantes archives d’Europe consacrées aux œuvres musicales et artistiques de l’univers concentrationnaire : 52 000 mètres de bandes enregistrées, 13 000 pages de documents, 10 000 microfilms, mémoires, correspondances clandestines et tout particulièrement des chants et des poèmes polonais de la déportation.

Enfin il parcourt le monde de Rome à Moscou, Tokyo, Londres et Mexico pour faire entendre ces « chants de l’enfer ». Il enregistre en Allemagne Fédérale et en Italie.

Alex Kulisiewicz l’affirme : « Je ne chante ni pour l’argent, ni pour la gloire. J’exécute le testament de mes compagnons de misère dont la voix s’est tue dans l’enfer des camps nazis. Je souhaite de tout mon cœur et je lutte pour que jamais plus et nulle part au monde ne renaissent des chants tels que « La Mère brûlée » ou « Le crucifié 1944 ».

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Aleksander Kulisiewicz

A talented singer, songwriter and performer who composed 54 songs during more than five years of imprisonment at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, Aleksander Kulisiewicz is also noteworthy for having created and preserved the largest collection in existence of music composed in the Nazi camps. Because this extraordinary collection touches on a variety of issues relevant not only to music scholarship but also contemporary European history, it is valuable to musicologists and Holocaust historians alike.

Born in 1918 in Krakow, Poland, Aleksander Kulisiewicz moved with his father to the town of Cieszyn, near the Czech border, and spent most of his adolescence there after his mother's premature death in 1922. His interest in music developed at an early age; he began classical violin studies at age seven, but it was his encounter with Roma music a year later that determined his lifelong taste for popular and folk musical entertainment. Kulisiewicz's enthusiasm for this style of music led to performances with a local Roma ensemble. A freak accident in 1928, however, left the fingers of his left hand burned, preventing further violin playing for some time. It also left him with a stutter that was eventually "cured" by a hypnotist, who, Kulisiewicz later claimed, also helped train his prodigious powers of recall. Kulisiewicz refashioned himself into an "artistic whistler" and appeared on stages across Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria. After completing gymnasium in 1936, Kulisiewicz traveled with a group of friends and classmates across the Balkans before returning to Poland to begin law studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow in 1937. He continued to seek out opportunities for performance wherever he could, turning with ever more confidence to singing. He developed a talent for imitating an impressive range of vocal styles, from Mieczysław Fogg to Tadeusz Faliszewski; this vocal prowess landed him engagements at the "Bagatela" revue theatre in Krakow and eventually a singing role in the Belgian documentary film Les noires désirent. As his theatrical appearances grew more frequent, he adopted the stage name "Alex Alikuli." During the summer before the outbreak of WWII, Kulisiewicz joined a travelling circus and worked as a clown's assistant in order to be near a circus performer with whom he had fallen in love.

Soon after Germany’s conquest of Poland in 1939, he was arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo for anti-fascist writings published that year in a student newspaper and a Cieszyn weekly. At the age of 22, after several prison transfers and episodes of torture at the hands of the Gestapo, he was deported to Sachsenhausen during the spring of 1940.

At Sachsenhausen, Kulisiewicz became something of a "camp troubadour"— a poet, player, and songwriter. He favoured broadsides—songs of attack whose aggressive language and macabre imagery mirrored his grotesque circumstances. But his repertoire also included ballads that often evoked his native Poland with nostalgia and patriotic zeal. He cast himself as a fortune-teller, a mystic, and prophesied outcomes of love and war for his Nazi oppressors. His audacity earned him the Polish nickname Kiciu bimbuś, “the devil-may-care-tomcat,” which alluded to both his fearlessness and his customary singing. His songs, performed at secret gatherings, helped inmates cope with their hunger and despair, raised morale, and sustained hope of survival. Beyond this spiritual and psychological importance, Kulisiewicz also considered the camp song to be a form of documentation. “In the camp,” he wrote,

I tried under all circumstances to create verses that would serve as direct poetical reportage. I used my memory as a living archive. Friends came to me and dictated their songs.

Perhaps his transforming experience in the camp had been his encounter with the Polish-born Jewish choir director Rosebery d’Arguto. Profoundly impressed after hearing a clandestine performance of D’Arguto’s “Jüdischer Todessang” (a parody of an old Yiddish counting song), Kulisiewicz pledged he would remember the work and sing it should he himself survive.

Aleksander Kulisiewicz was liberated on May 2, 1945, during a death march, or forced evacuation, from Sachsenhausen. After liberation, he remembered his songs as well as ones he learned from fellow prisoners and dictated hundreds of pages of them to his nurse in a Polish infirmary. Soon after his health returned he married, had children, and took a job as Prague correspondent for a Warsaw newspaper. Haunted by the sounds and images of Sachsenhausen, however, Kulisiewicz began to communicate with other survivors, collecting original materials, and compiling a library of literature related to artistic expression in concentration camps. In the early 1960s, he joined with ethnographer Józef Ligęza and folklorist Jan Tacina in a project to collect written and recorded interviews with former prisoners on the subject of music in the camps. During this period he also inaugurated a series of public recitals, radio broadcasts, and recordings, featuring his repertoire of prisoners' songs now greatly expanded to encompass material from at least a dozen Nazi camps. He toured throughout Europe performing at anti-fascist rallies, and to venues as remote as Japan and the U.S. He released albums in Poland, Germany Italy, France and the United States. Kulisiewicz also contributed articles on the subject of music in the camps to scholarly journals, most notably Przegląd Lekarski.

Kulisiewicz worked tirelessly to publish a monumental study of the cultural life of the camps, one that would address the vital role music played as a means of survival for many prisoners. He did not, however, complete this massive project by the time of his death in 1982. Kulisiewicz's near-finished 3,000-page typescript of song texts, musical notation and extensive annotations—the product of twenty years of painstaking research—is now a part of the Archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The supporting materials for this typescript make the Kulisiewicz Collection encyclopaedic in scope. Fifty-five feet of archival materials consisting of annotated song texts, music notation for vocal and instrumental works, poetry, original artwork, photographic material, scripts for puppet plays, musical diaries, and correspondence with survivors, it also includes cassette and reel-to-reel tape recordings of interviews with former prisoners concerning music in the camps, as well as songs performed by survivors who either composed these musical creations or sang them during imprisonment. Some 500 songs that represent the musical activity of thirty-six different camps can be found in the Collection. This uniquely valuable source documenting music-cultural activities among prisoners today still remains little known to the scholarly community.