Di Bone (Oj ta bona!)

Di Bone (Oj ta bona!) (Food Voucher)

Music and lyrics: unknown. Composition and arrangement by D. Zisl Slepovitch.
Performed by Hella R. (testimony hvt.4179, tape2) and Ada V. (testimony hvt.3707, tape 2)

This composition can hardly be called a song: it is rather a gathering of the rhymes by the so called bona-singers from Warsaw ghetto. Bona was a food voucher: without it, one could not purchase food in the Warsaw ghetto. While scarce in words, these verses convey the unspeakable tragedy of people who were dying from hunger in the street. Their bodies were later collected by the burial agency, the ‘Pinkiert.’ In the rather transparent ghetto lingo, ‘to give away the bona’ meant to die. While it was not correct to blame Pinkiert for anything, and in fact the agency was taking care of public health, in the mind of ghetto prisoners their name was firmly associated with death and starvation. Hella R. and Ada V. were both prisoners in the Warsaw ghetto and they both remembered the bona verses, but in two different languages, Yiddish and Polish. Existing memoirs and research papers on the subject are scarce, but they provide valuable additional insight into both the societal context of the bona-singers’ performances and additional variants of the same basic rhyme, which we have included in this composition. These come from Hanna Wehr, with another Polish variant, and Henryk Grynberg and Jan Kostański, who also provide a line that could be either in German or in Yiddish (“alle gleich.”)

The composition on this album as arranged by D. Zisl Slepovitch, includes several additional tunes that appear between the bona verses. Such tunes were likely to be heard in the streets of the Warsaw ghetto, as Jewish musicians illegally entertained the Polish citizens (the latter prohibited by the Germans from listening to the Jews performing music) and earned their living. To re-enact the soundscape of the ghetto street, we have included in this composition a fragment of the Polka-Mazurka dance tune and a popular Polish song Szła dzieweczka do laseczka (‘A Girl Was Walking to the Forest’), also known with a different tune and Yiddish lyrics under its other title that comes from the initial line of the chorus: Gdzie jest ta ulica… (‘Where Is That Street…’)—... (Vu iz dos gesele). ווּו איז דאָ ס געסעלע