Song of Survival

The community chorus for which I play the piano has a number of very senior citizens as well as young folk who like to sing. I have to sit down to play the piano, of course, but there are singers who have to sit down because they can't really stand, at least not for very long. Some of them walk with canes, and some have to take the very slow chair lift up to the second-story hall where we rehearse.

One of the things they are practicing for a program next week is a medley of Christmas songs from the documentary film, "Song of Survival", whose story was also told in a commercial film called "Paradise Road".

During World War II, in 1942, two women interned in a concentration camp in Sumatra wrote out in pencil, on scraps of paper, whatever music they could remember--orchestra music, piano pieces, hymns-- and taught the women prisoners to sing them in a four-part chorus.  Some of the women were so weak from malnutrition that they could not stand; they were barefoot and dressed in rags, plagued with tropical sores. Still they sang until more than half of them had died. The survivors said the music gave them the strength to go on.

In 1980, the original pencilled manuscripts were given to Stanford University; they were transcribed, performed by the Peninsula Women's Chorus, and then published in 2000.

The women in our community chorus, especially the very senior citizens, are singing these pieces with special beauty and fervor. These women are not prisoners. They wear nice clothes and are not malnourished, but many of them suffer from  various medical problems and physical limitations. They have their own reasons for feeling the Song of Survival very deeply. One of the women told me that when she sings this music, she usually has to sing it through her tears.