Shmuel Gogol

Schmuel Gogol (* 1924 in Warsaw ; † May 13, 1993 ) was a Holocaust survivor, harmonica player and music teacher .

Life

After his mother's death and his father's expulsion from Poland , he was raised by his grandmother. She took him to Janusz Korczak's orphanage, where he lived for a few years. It was in the orphanage (at the age of about 10 years, according to anecdote at the age of changing teeth), where he received his first two harmonica from Dr. Janus Korczak received.

At the time of the German occupation in World War II, the orphanage was moved to the Warsaw Ghetto . The orphans were all deported to Treblinka in 1942 and murdered there, with the exception of Gogol, whom his grandmother smuggled into the ghetto in Maków Mazowiecki . There he and his family were captured and deported to Auschwitz . His harmonica was confiscated immediately upon arrival, but he traded a harmonica for bread rations from a prisoner. Soon afterwards an SS man heard him play, and he was forced to play in the small camp orchestra that played near Crematorium III when Jews were gassed . While he was playing, Gogol saw his own family members when they were sent to the gas chamber, prompting him to stop opening his eyes when he played. He also vowed that if he survived, he would teach Jewish children how to play the harmonica. This story was told in a sermon for Kol Nidre at the Habon Congregation in Toronto.

After the war, Gogol went to Israel , where he founded the Children's Harmonica Orchestra of Ramat Gan in 1963 , which was later named after him. He married a woman from Schwetzingen . In 1990 Gogol returned to Auschwitz for the first time, where he and the band performed the song "Meine Schtetl Belz" (Yiddish: "Mayn Shtetele Belz"), the same melody Gogol played when he was in the camp almost 50 years earlier Prisoners marched to death.

As a contemporary witness, Gogol became an important protagonist in the Auschwitz memorial documentary "Paths of Memory". The German writer Thomas Vogel wrote a story about him in 1991. The Hohner company in Trossingen named a series of their chromatic harmonica Schmuel Gogol Chromonica .

In 1993 Gogol returned to Auschwitz, where he performed the same songs that he had played there as a prisoner in the presence of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin , who was visiting Poland on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising .

About a month after that trip, Gogol died at the age of 69.

Discography

• Schmuel Gogol & his Children's Harmonica Band , long-playing record , Hohner Records, 1988

Honors

• 1990: Korczak Prize of the German Korczak Society

Web links

• Memories of Janusz Korczak by Ulrike Müller, pages 4–5
• Youtube: Schmuel Gogol conducts his youth harmonica orchestra
• Return after 45 years from Die Zeit , July 13, 1990

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Date of birth September 15, 1924 according to the Auschwitz prisoner database , but apart from the name, the place of birth and a post-war stay in a place in France, there is no further information. Gogol actually performed in France after the war, but it remains unclear whether it was at that location and whether the entry in the database is that of Shmuel Gogol. All sources say that he died at the age of 69 - the date of birth from the database contradicts this.
2. ^ Kol Nidre sermon at Congregation Habonim . Archived from the original on January 29, 2016. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved July 26, 2015. 
3. ↑ on Youtube, soloist Schmuel Gogol
4. ↑ Paths of Memory , trailer on Youtube
5. ↑ Schmuel, Janusz, a harmonica , short story, published by S. Fischer 1991