During the Second World War music played a huge role in people’s lives. Songs such as We’ll meet again articulated the hopes of entire peoples, whilst Sentimental journey became an anthem amongst service personnel longing for the end of hostilities. But music was also to be found in the darkest places. Many concentration camps had camp orchestras which were forced to play at various moments, including during executions.
After the war, the Polish poet, journalist and singer Aleksander Kulisiewicz (who was interned in Sachsenhausen) spent decades collected poems, music and songs from the camps. In 1979 some of these were recorded by Smithsonian Folkways and released on an album entitled Tangos From the Depths of Hell. Amongst them was a poem from the Janowska Concentration Camp near Lviv (at that time part of occupied Poland and known as Lemberg) that had been set to the music of Eduardo’s Bianco mournful tango Plegaria. This poem references a Todestango, and it was assumed that this was the Todestango or “Death Tango” which was played by the camp orchestra during executions. This claim has been widely spread – you can read it, for instance, in Julio Nudler’s excellent book “Tango judió – Del ghetto a la milonga”, and it is stated as a fact on the website of the Holocaust Museum. You can also read it in the first printing of my book on Osvaldo Fresedo. (Note that this is a specific claim about one camp, the Janowska camp: other camps might also have had a Todestango, but these would have been different ones. Todestango is thus a genre rather than a specific piece of music).
During his long stay in Europe, Bianco courted the rich and powerful, playing before dictators such as Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. He is thought to have been a fascist sympathiser and it was thus easy to attribute a Todestango to him. But is it true? Recent research indicates that it was not. According to William de Haan, a Professor of Criminology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam – and a tango dancer – it was far more likely to have been Ta ostatnia niedziela (The last Sunday), a very popular and well-known tango in pre-war Poland. The composer of Ta ostatnia niedziela, Jerzy Petersburski, was popular in the Soviet Union (whose army liberated the Janowska camp). For Bianco to have been the author of a “Tango of Death” was a more convenient story for the Soviets. It also made for a much more compelling story, and the tale grew in the telling.
This is the briefest possible summary of a very complex topic. If you want to know more, I refer you to two recent books below.
I’ll leave you with my favourite version of Plegaria, the original and best in my opinion, recorded by the Bianco-Bachicha orchestra in Paris in 1927.
References
[1] Willem de Haan, Tango of Death: The Creation of a Holocaust Legend, 2023. ISBN: 978-90-04-52506-1. Read the beginning of Chapter 3 of de Haan’s book on the publisher’s website.
[2] Dirk Dietz, »Der Todestango«: Ursprung und Entstehung einer Legende, transcript, 2022, 206pp. ISBN: 978-3837662047
The majority of the pictures of the great tango musicians of the past were taken by just a handful of photographers. Today I want to introduce you to the most prolific: Sivul Wilenski, who is now forgotten by all save for a small group of enthusiasts. Born in Poland in 1897, Wilenski came to Buenos Aires in 1920 as a member of Iván Totsoff’s theatre company. Here he became interested in photography and started getting work after some years at the newspaper La Razón, taking photographs of society beauties for the “Notas Societas” pages. When La Razón opened an office in Paris he was sent there to open an exhibition of his photographs, staying for three years whilst he apprenticed himself to Parisian studios, developing himself as a photographer. His son Osias says that Sivul was much influenced by French poetic cinema – think of the films of Jean Renoir such as La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939).
