Aleksander Kulisiewicz preserved the music of the Nazi camps

One night in October 1942 SS guards burst into a barracks at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, savagely beating anyone within reach. Random acts of violence and murder were usual—but the gathering was not. The prisoners had formed a secret choir to perform “Jüdischer Todessang” (“Jewish death song”) by Rosebery d’Arguto, once a famous composer and conductor in Berlin, now an inmate. They began with bass notes, writes Makana Eyre, each one an “omen of death, like the footsteps of the men on their way to their demise”. It ended, unfinished, with the guards’ onslaught.