Aleksander Kuliseiwicz

Born: Unknown 1936, Krakow, Poland

Aleksander Kuliseiwicz studied the law, but his real passion was music. A student when the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, Aleksander expressed his antifascist opinions through his writing, and he suffered for them. The Gestapo arrested Aleksander and sent him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. Though they were able to lock Aleksander up, they couldn't keep him silent. During his six years of imprisonment, Aleksander wrote 54 songs, mostly about the horrendous treatment of prisoners at the camp. he songs helped the prisoners cope with inhuman conditions. They also helped to document the conditions at the camp. After the camp was liberated, Aleksander remembered his songs, as well as the songs of his fellow prisoners. He dictated hundreds of pages of lyrics to the nurse that took care of him at a Polish infirmary.

After the war, Aleksander became a collector, gathering music, poetry, and artwork of camp prisoners. He played his camp songs at recitals in the 1960s, and issued recordings of them as well. He embarked on a monumental study of culture in the concentration camps, and the role of music as a survival tool for the prisoners. His music lives on today, part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archive.