«The Well» by the Klezmatics & Chava Alberstein
In recent times I listened repeatedly to a particular piece of music. The CD had already been on my shelf for quite a while then last fall it was to win my full attention. It is the album “The Well” by the Klezmatics and the Israeli singer Chava Alberstein. It summarizes a collection of Yiddish songs full of melancholy and longing for a more dignified course of the world where people will live together in love and mutual respect instead of acting on the believe that the survival of one group depends on the defeat of another one.
My sister Khaye whose eyes were green and braids were black
Mayn Shvester Khaye (My sister Khaje) is about a girl who – barely ten years old – took care of her siblings while her mother had to earn money outside their home. Later Khaje was to share the same tragic fate as hundreds of thousands of other Jewish children during the terror of German National Socialism: she was deported, gassed and burned at the Treblinka extermination camp. The author of the song describes himself as the last survivor who has known her. For her he wrote the song in Yiddish, «in teg di shreklekhe fun undzer tsayt» (in the terrible days of our time). He completed the last stanza with the wonderful words: «To G-d Himself she is an only daughter. She sits in heaven at His right hand».
Deeper Studies
Not long ago I spent weeks studying a wide variety of resources about the period of Nazi Germany and its aftermath: I watched documentary films, combed a stack of books, got me a number of feature films and consulted numerous websites on the topic.
During this process that is far from being completed my wish grew to sum up my feelings and insights from it in a communicable form. As a result, I decided to create the website «achronon.ch»
Thomas Blaser-Böhlen
Oberdiessbach BE • Switzerland