Contributed by Jon Endres
In my job as the main media digitization person here at the Cummings Center, I have the opportunity to hear and see things that sometimes have not been seen or heard in decades or longer. This is one of my favorite aspects of the job – outside of being able to actively do a service for the study of history – and sometimes we find things that we did not know we had, or even existed.
My most recent project involved digitizing audio recordings from wire spools. On these spools, Dr. David Pablo Boder recorded fascinating things, from interviews with people displaced by the 1951 Kansas City Flood to speeches and radio programs.
The three boxes of spools in the AHAP collection
Boder’s most famous work was done in 1946 when he traveled across Germany, Italy, France, and Switzerland and collected interviews with displaced persons–many of them Holocaust survivors–in the aftermath of World War II. Most of the recordings were uncovered in the late 1990s between the Library of Congress and the Illinois Institute of Technology, spurring much interest in Boder’s work.
From a 16mm film of Boder in Germany
There was one wire spool that was never found, being referenced in his work but not found in the various Boder collections. This spool was of Jewish songs from a displaced persons camp in Henonville, France.
As I went through the three boxes of spools that we have at the archives I began to take stock of what we knew we had on spools versus what we had no idea about. Among these “confused” wire spools was the one below.
The spool above had been erroneously entered into the finding aid as “Heroville Songs” when the collection was originally processed in the 1960s. It did not take me long to realize that the tin says “Henonville? Songs.” But this was no guarantee that this was the content on the spool. Even the tin itself seemed a bit unsure about its own content.
It took me a few days to get comfortable enough with the medium to put the Henonville Songs on to digitize – these are very fragile and I did not want to risk destroying history – but when I did I was blown away.
These are the missing songs Boder recorded from those survivors, recorded more than 60 years ago. The feeling of knowing what I had found and the understanding that I was listening to something few before me had heard was a very different and personal thing for me. It felt like I was helping in some way to bring these voices to the present, voices that had become somewhat lost to the historical record.
The discovery of this single canister holding a lost recording means that these songs can be heard again, they can be studied, and they can inform us in a new way about the experiences, the joys, and the frustrations of these displaced persons.
Below are several samples from the Henonville Songs spool. Please give them a listen, they’ve been waiting a long time.
Dr. Boder’s Introduction: Song Clip 1:Song Clip 2:Song Clip 3:
[Note: If you’re interested in hearing or using Boder’s work for research, please contact us at ahap@uakron.edu.]
Jon, What a great find!! And a wonderful example of the joys of archival research. Thanks for sharing such treasures with the rest of us.
Ben
Dear Jon Endres,
you did splendid work, congratulation. This is a great contrubution for the international reasearch on Boder´s wire recordings with Displaced Persons. Thank you very much for sharing your findings and your ongoing research. Good luck further on.
Axel Dossmann (University of Jena, Germany)
[…] Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology since 1967. But it wasn’t until a recent project to digitize the recordings got under way that a spool containing the “Henonville Songs,” performed in Yiddish and German and long […]
[…] recordings of Holocaust survivors singing melodies at a refugee camp in France in 1946 have been heard for the first time in decades, thanks to […]
Fantastic job. I look forward to hearing more of these.
May these beautiful voices from the past remind us to welcome all of today’s refugees with open arms. Act now to help those in need, so that, G-d willing, our own great-grandchildren will have no need to study the crimes against humanity being committed today.
[…] recordings of Holocaust survivors singing melodies at a refugee camp in France in 1946 are being heard for the first time in decades, thanks to […]
[…] After digitizing the fragile recording, the researcher was ‘blown away’ by what he’d found, he explains in a blog post. […]
[…] After digitizing the fragile recording, the researcher was ‘blown away’ by what he’d found, he explains in a blog post. […]
[…] Puedes escuchar fragmentos de canciones AQUÍ […]
[…] Ohio — Wire recordings of Holocaust survivors singing melodies at a refugee camp in France in 1946 are being heard for the first time in decades, thanks to […]
[…] After digitizing the fragile recording, the researcher was ‘blown away’ by what he’d found, he explains in a blog post. […]
[…] After digitizing the fragile recording, the researcher was ‘blown away’ by what he’d found, he explains in a blog post. […]
[…] After digitizing the fragile recording, the researcher was ‘blown away’ by what he’d found, he explains in a blog post. […]
[…] After digitizing a frail recording, a researcher was ‘blown away’ by what he’d found, he explains in a blog post. […]
[…] After digitizing the fragile recording, the researcher was ‘blown away’ by what he’d found, he explains in a blog post. […]
[…] After digitizing the fragile recording, the researcher was ‘blown away’ by what he’d found, he explains in a blog post. […]
Amazing!jewish people is certainly the chosen people by GOD.I believe that with all my heart.
Will a DVD be available for purchase? I would like to give one to each of my grandchildren.
Congratulations Mr Endres its really an awesome research…I feel sad of hearing that songs from Holocaust survivors…
[…] The digitization project was underway when they found one spool in a tin box that had been inventoried as “Heroville Songs.” It was a mistake. The label on the box actually said “Henonville Songs.” It was the long-lost spool. UA multimedia specialist Jon Endres digitized the song recordings and was the first to hear those haunting voices in decades. You can read his blog entry about the discovery here. […]
[…] er alsjeblieft naar, ze wachten daar al heel lang op,” stelt Baker. De opnamen zijn onder aan deze blogpost terug te […]
Dear Jon, you have done a great job. Thank you so very much for it. We are blown away the same as you and your colleagues are. And I am sure that the material will be used a lot by many people in their research and work. I, for one, will be in touch on that immediately. With warmest regards and huge thank you,
Inna. Dr Inna Rogatchi, President, the Rogatchi Foundation, the author of the Lessons of Survival. Conversations with SImon Wiesenthal Film, and Shining Souls. Champions of Humanity project.
[…] Researcher Jon Enders was rummaging through three boxes in the archives when he came upon the spool that had been entered into the system as “Heroville Songs.” He was “blown away,” he wrote in a blog post. […]
[…] Researcher Jon Enders was rummaging through three boxes in the archives when he came upon the spool that had been entered into the system as “Heroville Songs.” He was “blown away,” he wrote in a blog post. […]
Fascinating and sobering.
“For there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!””
-Psalm 137:3
[…] Researcher Jon Enders was rummaging through three boxes in the archives when he came upon the spool that had been entered into the system as “Heroville Songs.” He was “blown away,” he wrote in a blog post. […]
Such strong voices. Consider that these singers had just watched their loved ones destroyed.
Reblogged this on intergalactic581.
[…] le logiciel Adobe Audio. L’équipe a ainsi pu restituer six chansons, qu’il est désormais possible d’écouter en ligne. L’équipe de Dr Baker est actuellement en train de numériser le reste des […]
HOW SAD and Will NEVER KNOW THE NAMES OF THOSE Singers…
Wonderful job …SO many THINGS seems TO Pop OUT FROM THE PAST
Inestimable documents! Bravo merci! j’aimerai tant écouter ces enregistrements dans leur ensemble…
[…] Some of the recordings can be heard at the bottom of this page. […]
[…] After digitizing the fragile recording, the researcher was ‘blown away’ by what he’d found, he explains in a blog post. […]
[…] of at least 130 Jewish survivors of Nazi death camps. The recordings included a reel of songs, sung in Yiddish and German, that were meant to inspire resistance, as well as songs the imprisoned Jews were forced to sing by […]
[…] summer, we digitized the wire recordings from Dr. David P. Boder’s collection and discovered 17 spools of 1951 interviews with a woman named […]
[…] Amerického muzea holocaustu ve Washingtonu, D.C. Ukázky si můžete poslechnout také na tomto blogu. Více bude k dispozici díky stále probíhající […]
Good job