JewishSong.org
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, a seventeen-year-old Gordonia youth counsellor, dedicated this Polish-language song to the thirty children in her care. World ORT dates its creation after the September 1942 deportation. She used the familiar Polish children's melody Jada dzieci, jada droga. The archive preserves her own performance, recorded by Gila Flam in Israel in 1985.
The borrowed children's melody and the words about deportation pull in opposite directions. The song asks where the children are going; that question expresses uncertainty and grief. It should not be turned into a claim about everything Harel or other ghetto residents knew: ORT also records her awareness that earlier deportees had not returned.
The archive allows us to hear Harel singing her own words decades later. Compare that testimony with Elechka's Russian recording: the continuity is in the song's remembered children and its borrowed tune, while the Russian images belong to Olga Anikina's poetic adaptation.
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
The historical text presented by World ORT is Polish. Olga Anikina's Russian adaptation and the English meaning translation on this page are later stages of reception. The English column translates the Russian poem; it is neither Harel's exact wording nor an English-language performance. Reading the versions together helps distinguish testimony, adaptation and explanation.
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 what the unanswered question about the destination does in the song. Distinguish what its speaker says from what historical sources establish.
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