Children on the Train, written for thirty children
In September 1942 the Lodz ghetto lived through eight days that its people called the greyse shpere, the great curfew. In the record of the World ORT archive Music and the Holocaust, some twenty thousand people, the elderly, the sick and the young, were taken out of the ghetto during those days. It was one of the most traumatic events in the life of that community.
Miriam Harel was seventeen years old and a youth counsellor in the Gordonia movement, responsible for a group of thirty children. When she learned that her children were to be deported, she wrote the words of this song and dedicated it to them. She remembered their dark, questioning eyes. She set the words to a melody every child in the city already knew: a Polish children's song about children riding down a road.
That is what gives the song its terrible quality. Nothing in the melody warns you. It is a bright little travelling tune, the kind you clap along to, and the words underneath it are about a train leaving with children on it. The song never says where the train is going, because the people who watched it leave did not know either.
Miriam Harel survived. In 1985, in Israel, the researcher Gila Flam recorded her singing this song, and it is preserved in Flam's study of the music of the Lodz ghetto, Singing for Survival. The song reaches us in the voice of the person who wrote it.
The Russian version on this page is a poetic adaptation by the poet Olga Anikina, made in 2017 and sung by Elechka. It keeps the plainness of the original: sunlight, a dusty window, wires humming, a sister and a brother, and a train that melts into the light.
Why bring it into English
This is one of the songs that museums and teachers ask for most often and can least often use, because it has lived in Yiddish and in Polish memory rather than in the languages of the people who come to learn. Carrying it into Russian and then line by line into English lets a class in any country hear exactly what was written, in the words of a seventeen year old who was there.
The words, line by line
Russian adaptation by Olga Anikina, 2017. The English beside it is a literal, line by line rendering for understanding only. It is not a singing version, so please do not perform it.
For parents and educators
Recommended age: ten and up. This one asks more of a listener than the other songs in the chapter, because the subject is children being taken away, and the melody is deliberately cheerful.
Before you listen, name the situation simply: in a closed part of a city, children were put on a train and taken away, and the young woman who looked after them wrote this song for them. Say that the tune is a happy children's song on purpose, and ask your listener to notice how that feels. Naming it in advance keeps the surprise from landing as a shock.
After you listen, stay with the small things rather than the big ones. The song is made of a dusty window, humming wires, a pair of shoes, a signal over the platform. Ask which detail stayed with them. Ask why the song never says where the train is going. Older students usually see it themselves: the person writing did not know, and pretending otherwise would be a lie.
What to avoid: no photographs of deportations, no numbers, no reconstruction of what happened at the end of the line. If the question comes, answer honestly and briefly that most of those children did not come back, and then return to the fact that one person remembered them by name in a song, and that we are still singing it.
Sources
- Music and the Holocaust (World ORT): the Lodz ghetto, the songs of 1942 and 1943
- Yad Vashem: the September 1942 deportation of the children of the Lodz ghetto
- Gila Flam, Singing for Survival: Lives of the Lodz Ghetto, University of Illinois Press
- The chapter page on this site: Songs of the Holocaust