Shtubuneltsto

Shtubuneltsto (The Senior in the Barrack)

Music and lyrics: Jankele Herszkowicz; arrangement: D. Zisl Slepovitch

Joseph W. (HVT-2852) was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1929 where, when the Nazi occupation began, he and his family were locked in the ghetto. One of Joseph’s brightest memories was of Jankele Herszkowicz (1911-72), pronounced Yánkele Hershkóvitsh, who composed many songs in the Lodz Ghetto and was famous as the ‘ghetto troubadour.’ “For everyone who came into the ghetto, he composed a song,” says Joseph, “Jankele brought something extraordinary to the ghetto that was greater than medicine or anything else.”

Both Joseph W. and Herszkowicz were deported, first to Auschwitz and then to a slave labor camp in Braunschweig, Germany. There they were likely working at the Büssing truck factory, to which a lot of Lodz Jews were brought in 1944–45.

Jankele Herszkowicz wrote many songs that quickly gained popularity. Most were written in the Lodz ghetto, such as the more famous Rumkowski Chaim and Geto, getunya. While at Auschwitz-Birkenau, he only wrote this one song, Shtubuneltsto.

Herszkowicz survived the war and the post-war massacres in Poland, but he never emigrated to Israel, even in the wake of the mass exodus that followed Władysław Gomułka’s notorious antisemitic policy; although he did consider that option at some point. Joseph suggests that this was perhaps because Herszkowicz’s wife was not Jewish. The ‘Ghetto troubadour’ took his own life in 1972. “Did he sing in Poland after the war? Perhaps at the beginning, but afterwards—with whom? Everyone eventually left,” says Joseph.

Herszkowicz’s two sons passed their father’s manuscripts to Joseph, as they were close friends. In his testimony, Joseph said that he wanted to publish all this material in a book, but that likely never happened. However, many of Herszkowicz’s songs survived through the rare oral performances of survivors and most of them were saved and preserved thanks to Gila Flam’s seminal research. The latter became the source for the 2005 record by the Brave Old World band, Dus gezang fin geto Lodzh (Song of the Lodz Ghetto). Discovery and recording of Shutubuneltsto coming directly from Herszkowicz’s close friend is of special value, as the survivors themselves wanted to forget this repertoire, and did not perform the songs at all.

Shtubuneltsto conveys the grim reality of the unbearable conditions at the camp. The Yiddish lyrics carry strong influence of German, as well as camp slang. It would be hard, if not impossible, to properly transcribe and understand the song, if not for the good chance that we received the assistance of Samuel Norich, the publisher of the Forward. Norich was born in 1947 in a DP camp in Germany where such slang was still in use.

The musical genre of this song is an upbeat freylekhs-like dance, in stark contrast to its content. The freylekhs-like feeling of the song, as sung by Joseph in his testimony, becomes a vehicle for the dark humor that saturates the lyrics.