Kurt Weill (1900-l950)
We Will Never Die

We Will Never Die was a dramatic pageant staged before an audience of 40,000 at Madison Square Garden on March 9, 1943, to raise public awareness of the mass murder of the European Jews. The pageant starred Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni and subsequently traveled to other cities. Kurt Weill (1900-l950) was a leading composer in Germany and subsequently for the Broadway theatre. Moss Hart (l904-l961) was a leading Broadway dramatist.
Weill and Hart had recently scored a big Broadway success with Lady in the Dark (lyrics by Ira Gershwin) and at the time were supporting the war effort by collaborating on Lunch Hour Follies, a series of variety shows staged by the American Theatre Wing to boost the morale of workers in factories manufacturing war materials. (Weill, who had not yet been granted U.S. citizenship, was often barred from the defense plants).
It is unlikely that Weill and Ben Hecht had met during Hecht's reporting stint for the Chicago Daily News in Berlin in the early 1920s, but Weill had identified Hecht as early as 1934 as a potential American collaborator. It is probable that they met soon after Weill came to the U.S. in 1935 to work on The Eternal Road, a huge biblical spectacle staged in New York by Max Reinhardt with music by Weill and a libretto by Franz Werfel. Weill was also eventually connected socially to Hecht through his fellow neighbors living in Rockland County, including Burgess Meredith, Helen Hayes, and her husband Charles MacArthur, who was Hecht's frequent collaborator.
Weill had all the necessary credentials to collaborate on We Will Never Die. As a German emigrant, son of a cantor, student of Ferruccio Busoni, and a born theater composer, he had mastered techniques for the effective use of music in both pageants and radio. He had used theater to highlight social concerns throughout his career. Although often characterized as a “political” composer because of his association in Germany with Bertolt Brecht, close analysis of his music and writings reveal him to be more concerned with the human condition than with political causes. His willingness to work on We Will Never Die was probably motivated more by the plight of the Jews in Europe than by a conviction to join Hecht in supporting Peter Bergson and the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews
Although largely a pacifist in his early years, Weill was deeply committed to supporting the American war effort and demonstrating his allegiance to the U.S. In 1941 he provided music for Fun to be Free. This earlier pageant by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur was staged at Madison Square Garden and sponsored by Fight for Freedom Inc., a group that supported total U.S. involvement in the European war. He also wrote propaganda songs (some for broadcast in Germany); incidental music for Your Navy, a radio program written by Maxwell Anderson and jointly commissioned by CBS and NBC; music for Salute to France, a U.S. propaganda film directed by Jean Renoir; and four patriotic melodramas for Helen Hayes, recorded by RCA Victor under the title Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.
When approached by Hecht to collaborate on We Will Never Die, Weill was busy developing a script with Bella Spewack for a Broadway show based on One Man's Venus to star Marlene Dietrich (a project that did not materialize but that would later develop with other collaborators into One Touch of Venus). After reading Hecht's script, Weill decided to reuse some music from The Eternal Road as well as other preexisting music that would have meaning to the audience. As a result, the score is not a formal composition but a collection of incidental music compiled to highlight the dramatic shape of Hecht's script.
Weill brought composer and conductor Isaac von Grove to the project to lead the 50-piece NBC Orchestra, prepare the choruses, and deal with musical logistics. Having conducted 153 performances of The Eternal Road, Grove was the perfect musician to adapt excerpts from the work to the requirements of We Will Never Die. (Grove had also conducted Weill's music for Railroads on Parade, which played five performances a day during the 1939-40 New York World's Fair).
The Hollywood Bowl performance on July 21, l943, which was broadcast on NBC nationwide, was conducted by well-known film composer Franz Waxmann. Unfortunately, none of the performing materials have survived, which would have provided clues as to how much the “score” was altered to accommodate the requirements of subsequent productions after the first two performances at Madison Square Garden in New York. Although this Hollywood Bowl broadcast describes the production as an “exact replica” of the New York production, the recorded text differs in some respects from Weill's copy of the script. One can hear music from The Eternal Road adapted as background music for the spoken texts and an orchestral version of Miriam's Song used for incidental music. Also included are sundry fanfares, successions of sustained chords, and fragments of Nazi music countered by arrangements of the Hatikvah and the Warschawianka. The second section, Jews in the War, features a sequence of national anthems and melodies, including Tipperary and the Red Army Song by Lev Knipper, which is also known as Cavalry of the Steppes.
Because most of the musical sources have vanished, it is very difficult to reconstruct the music for We Will Never Die short of transcribing what can be imperfectly heard on the radio recording. In the end, the music is not central to an appreciation of the work, nor did Weill really ever claim it as a composition. But Weill knew how to use music to dramatic effect, and he succeeded in providing the heightened emotion that combined effectively with all the other theatrical elements to make We Will Never Die a overpowering experience.

Article written by David Farneth

Shattering the Silence Surrounding the Holocaust

In early 1943, a Gallup poll asked Americans: "It is said that two million Jews have been killed in Europe since the war began. Do you think this is true or just a rumor?" Although the Allied leadership had publicly confirmed that two million Jews had been murdered, the poll found that only 47% believed it was true, while 29% dismissed it as a rumor; the remaining 24% had no opinion.
A major part of the reason for the public's skepticism was the failure of the American media to treat the Nazi genocide as a serious issue. Ben Hecht, the newspaper columnist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter (Gone with the Wind, The Front Page, Scarface), responded the only way he knew how: he picked up his pen and began to write.
A colleague later recalled: "Once Ben Hecht decided right from wrong on any issue, he mobilized all his faculties to fight for his beliefs with righteous fury." The journalist Max Lerner put it this way: "Ben Hecht's talent lay in his capacity to dramatize whatever it was that he touched. He could make a breakfast egg seem theatrical."
Determined to alert the American public about the Nazi slaughter of the Jews, Hecht authored a dramatic pageant that he called We Will Never Die. (The title derived from a biblical verse affirming Jewish national survival.) With its cast of hundreds, We Will Never Die would be an extraordinary production in every sense of the word. According to Hecht's plan, the actors would stand in front of two forty-foot-high tablets of the Ten Commandments. They would read aloud a long list of Jews who made important contributions to civilization throughout history. They would describe the Nazi slaughter of the Jews in painful detail. A group of children, garbed in white rags and their faces painted grey to resemble corpses, would quietly say the words "Remember us" over and over again. The performance would culminate in the dramatic reciting of "Kaddish," the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, by fifty elderly rabbis who had escaped from Europe.
Hecht presented the project to Peter Bergson (real name: Hillel Kook), a Zionist emissary from Palestine who had established a political action committee to lobby in Washington for the creation of a Jewish army to fight the Nazis. When the news of the genocide was revealed, Bergson changed his agenda and began concentrating on urging the Allies to rescue Jews from Hitler.
Hecht and Bergson tried, but failed, to persuade major Jewish organizations to co-sponsor We Will Never Die. A meeting of representatives of 32 Jewish groups, hosted by Hecht, dissolved in shouting matches as ideological and personal rivalries left the Jewish organizations unable to cooperate.
Not only did they refuse to co-sponsor it, but in some cities, mainstream Jewish groups actually sought to discourage attempts to organize local performances of the pageant. Some Jewish leaders feared the Bergson group's vocal activism would usurp their own leadership role in the Jewish community. Other Jewish leaders worried that dramatic public activities such as Hecht's pageant might provoke antisemitism. Some would not work with Bergson because their particular factions in the Zionist movement regarded him as their political rival (he had been a follower of the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky).
The White House was less than enthusiastic about the project. The pageant's producer, Billy Rose, wrote to a senior White House adviser, David Niles, requesting a message from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to be read aloud at the event. FDR's advisers urged him to refrain from sending the message because it might "raise a political question." They feared We Will Never Die would increase pressure to admit Jewish refugees to the United States. The President declined Rose's request.
The British were equally unhappy. A memo from the British Embassy in Washington to the Foreign Office in London complained that the pageant was "implicitly anti-British." Although the text of We Will Never Die did not directly denounce the British, its appeal to the Allies to find havens for Jewish refugees was understood as including the possibility of allowing the refugees to enter British-controlled Palestine--something London vehemently opposed, for fear of angering Arab opinion.
Where Bergson and Hecht did find significant support was in Hollywood and on Broadway. Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, Sylvia Sydney, and Luther Adler starred in We Will Never Die. Moss Hart directed it, and Kurt Weill composed an original score for the event. Local stars took part when the pageant was staged in various cities. In those days, it was unusual for Hollywood and Broadway stars to become involved in political causes. Ben Hecht's ability to attract such prominent figures from the entertainment industry gave an important boost to Bergson's campaign against the Holocaust.
We Will Never Die played to audiences of more than 40,000 in two shows at Madison Square Garden on March 9 and March 10, 1943. The event received substantial media coverage, thus carrying its message to audiences well beyond those who actually attended the pageant.
The pageant was next staged in Washington, D.C.'s Constitution Hall on April 12, before an audience that included First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, six justices of the Supreme Court, more than two hundred Members of Congress, and numerous members of the international diplomatic corps.
Mrs. Roosevelt was so moved by the performance that she devoted part of her next syndicated column to the pageant and the plight of Europe's Jews. For millions of American newspaper readers, it was the first time they heard about the Nazi mass murders.
For the Washington, D.C. performance, Hecht inserted several special passages appealing to the Allies to take action to rescue the Jews from Hitler. This was an important departure from the conventional wisdom of those days, which was expressed in a slogan that Roosevelt administration officials offered when challenged on the refugee issue: "Rescue through victory." Meaning, there was nothing the U.S. could do to help the Jews until after the Nazis were defeated on the battlefield.
By contrast, Bergson and Hecht argued that there were many steps the American government could take right away to save Jews from Hitler, steps that would not interfere with the war effort. For example, empty supply ships returning from Europe could be used to bring refugees who could be held in temporary detention camps. Or pressure could be put on countries such as Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, which were not yet occupied by the Nazis, to let their Jews emigrate. Later, the Bergson group would call for additional steps, such as bombing Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.
On April 22, We Will Never Die was performed in Philadelphia's Convention Hall, with guest stars Claude Rains and Edward G. Arnold in the lead roles. More than 15,000 people attended--it was the largest Jewish public event in the city in many years--and it received extensive coverage in the local press.
An editorial in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent commented on the Bergson group's use of an unconventional tactic, a dramatic theater production, to raise consciousness about the Holocaust: "Even the most indifferent, whether Jew or Christian, had impressed upon him the twin themes: the tragedy of the Jews in Europe and [the need for] 'action--not pity'... 'We Will Never Die' demonstrated for all to see that in order to reach the conscience of the Christian as well as to arouse the Jew himself, popular psychology must be understood and utilized. The 'old reliable' organizations, must with the mothballs of their sanctimoniousness, would do well to emulate the example set."
The same week that We Will Never Die was performed in Philadelphia, representatives of the American and British governments were meeting in Bermuda to discuss the Jewish refugee problem. But despite 12 days of discussions, the conference which was supposed to help rescue the refugees produced no concrete plans for rescue. The U.S. delegates reaffirmed the Roosevelt administration's refusal to take in more refugees, while the British delegates would not even discuss the possibility of opening Palestine to Jews fleeing Hitler.
The Bermuda fiasco aroused outrage throughout the American Jewish community. The Bergson group placed a large advertisement in the New York Times, headlined "To 5,000,000 Jews in the Nazi Death-Trap, Bermuda Was a Cruel Mockery." While mainstream Jewish organizations were often at odds with Bergson, they were on the same side in denouncing Bermuda. Dr. Israel Goldstein, president of the Synagogue Council of America, blasted the conference as "not only a failure, but a mockery," and bluntly added that "the victims are not being rescued because the democracies do not want them." The Labor Zionist magazine Jewish Frontier charged that the delegates to Bermuda had acted "in the spirit of undertakers."
On Capitol Hill, too, angry voices were heard. Congressman Emanuel Celler denounced the Bermuda conference as "diplomatic tight-rope walking." His colleague Samuel Dickstein declared: "Not even the pessimists among us expected such sterility."
Until the Bermuda conference, most American Jews and most Members of Congress had accepted FDR's "rescue through victory" approach. But in the wake of Bermuda, there was a growing conviction that by the time the war was won, there might be no European Jews left to save.
During the spring and summer of 1943, the Bergson group intensified its campaign of newspaper ads, public rallies, and lobbying on Capitol Hill. It also continued to stage We Will Never Die in major cities.
On May 19, Hecht's pageant was performed at the Chicago Stadium, with guest stars John Garfield and Burgess Meredith in the lead roles. An estimated 20,000 people attended as the stadium, "scene of many a hectic convention and gaudy circus, was turned into a house of worship," as the Chicago Daily News put it.
On June 6, We Will Never Die was performed at the Boston Garden, with guest stars Ralph Bellamy, Lionel Atwill, Howard Da Silva, Berry Kroger, and Jacob Ben-Ami in prominent roles. The Boston Jewish Advocate reported: "This spectacle must have impressed and stirred the imagination of the many who saw it to a degree impossible to achieve through the printed word."
The climactic performance was at the Hollywood Bowl on July 21. The Los Angeles Times reported: "The vast stage was filled with hundreds of symbolic figures, while 10,000 spectators watched almost with bated breath the remarkable pictorial impression--one of the greatest that has ever been revealed in the outdoor amphitheater." The audience included "a California Who's Who," among them Governor Earl Warren, Bishop and Mrs. W. Bertrand Stevens, Presiding Judge of the Superior Court Emmet H. Wilson, and a long list of Hollywood actors, writers, and producers.
Capitalizing on the publicity from We Will Never Die, the newspaper ads, and other protest activities, Bergson persuaded leading Members of Congress, in October 1943, to introduce a resolution urging the creation of a U.S. government agency to rescue Jewish refugees. It quickly passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was the subject of hearings before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The hearings on the rescue resolution set off a firestorm of controversy when a State Department official presented testimony that wildly exaggerated the number of refugees who had already been permitted to enter the United States.
Meanwhile, just as the refugee controversy was making headlines, a group of senior aides to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. were uncovering a pattern of attempts by the State Department to obstruct rescue opportunities and block the flow of Holocaust information to the United States. They drafted a report titled "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews."
Armed with this information, Morgenthau went to the president in January 1944 to warn him that the refugee issue had become "a boiling pot on [Capitol] Hill" and Congress was likely to pass the rescue resolution unless the White House acted. Roosevelt pre-empted Congress by establishing the new agency that the resolution had sought--the War Refugee Board.
Morgenthau acknowledged that it was the Bergson group's work that had created that "boiling pot." At a Treasury Department staff meeting not long after the creation of the War Refugee Board, discussing the factors that made its creation possible, he remarked: "The tide was running with me.... The thing that made it possible to get the President really to act on this thing [was] the [rescue] Resolution [which] at least had passed the Senate to form this kind of a War Refugee Committee, hadn't it? I think that six months before [the rescue resolution] I couldn't have done it."
Major newspapers saw it similarly. An editorial in the Christian Science Monitor noted that the establishment of the Board "is the outcome of pressure brought to bear by the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, a group made up of both Jews and non-Jews that has been active in the capital in recent months." A Washington Post editorial commented that in view of Bergson's "industrious spadework" on behalf of rescue, the Emergency Committee was "entitled to credit for the President's forehanded move."
The War Refugee Board's activities, which included financing the rescue work of Raoul Wallenberg, saved the lives of over 200,000 people during the final 15 months of the war. We Will Never Die helped set in motion the events that led to the saving of those lives.

Article written by Rafael Medoff, director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies

Bibliography

 

 

We Will Never Die:  A Pageant to Save the Jews of Europe

By Bret Werb
 http://orelfoundation.org/index.php/journal/journalArticle/we_will_never_die_a_pageant_to_save_the_jews_of_europe/
Posted August 10, 2010

In the spring and summer of 1943, a theater piece with a stellar cast and an urgent message scooped the daily press to bring news of the genocide of European Jews to a scarcely believing American public. Subtitled “A memorial dedicated to the 2,000,000 Jewish dead of Europe,” We Will Never Die was the brainchild of the popular screenwriter Ben Hecht (1894–1964). Those unfamiliar with Hecht's name will probably recognize the titles of some of the more than 150 films to which he contributed: Scarface, Twentieth Century, Gone With the Wind, Notorious, A Star Is Born. i An ex-newsman who had lived the fabulous-gaudy life that a Chicago newsman of the nineteen-teens and the roaring teens and '20s was supposed to have lived, Hecht had an insider's grasp of the popular media and the confidence and enterprise to challenge its priorities openly.

Born in New York City and raised in Racine, Wisconsin, Hecht, by his early twenties, was a star reporter for the Chicago Daily News. He spent time as a correspondent in Weimar Germany and as a litterateur in Manhattan before coming, at age 30, to Hollywood, where his facility with words assured him steady work and a staggering income. Soon after the start of the Second World War, however, Hecht's emerging sense of Jewish identity and his unblinking assessment of the Nazi racial agenda, along with a sense that his “easy” earnings from movie hackwork might somehow benefit mankind, combined to transform him into a high-level propagandist. His pet cause, the main beneficiary of his energy and polemical flair, was the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, whose leader, the militant Zionist activist Peter Bergson (1915-2001), would become a lifelong friend and mentor. ii


Figure 1: “For Sale To Humanity” (excerpt),
New York Times, February 13, 1943.
Hecht and Bergson placed this and similar ads in several U.S. newspapers.
(David S. Wyman, America and the Holocaust, Vol. 2.)
To see this image in bigger format, click here.

Birth of a Pageant

During the first months of 1943, although the United States had been at war for more than a year, Americans were skeptical—or else simply unaware—of the occasional, often well-buried news reports of the Holocaust that was already taking place. iii Among those with an entrée to mainstream media, Hecht alone seemed willing to articulate what others in the country could not or would not say: that the Germans meant to kill every Jew in Europe; that the Jews, a stateless people, could expect no special help from the Allies; and that the best hope for Jewish survival lay in Jewish self-defense.

In February 1943, Hecht's article “The Extermination of the Jews”—a dramatic recounting of Nazi horrors from the victims' point of view—appeared in The American Mercury. Abridged as “Remember Us,” it almost immediately reappeared in the popular Reader's Digest. iv Hoping to capitalize on the publicity, Hecht convened a think tank at the Manhattan home of playwright George S. Kaufman. He related his account of this affair in his autobiography, A Child of the Century:

Thirty famous writers (and one composer) were assembled at George Kaufman's house by my friend, his wife Beatrice. All had written hit plays or successful novels. Put their names together and you had the box-office flower of American culture. In addition to success, wit and influence, they had in common the fact that they were all Jews.
I had said to Bea that thirty New York dinner guests might save the surviving four million Jews in Europe. The first massacre scores had come in: dead Jews—two million; anti-German-butchery protests—none.
I looked eagerly at the thirty celebrities in Bea's drawing room. Some were friends, some enemies. Some wrote like artists (almost), some like clodhoppers. Some were insufferably fatheaded, some psychotically shy. But such variation was unimportant. Bold, shy, Shakespeare or Boob McNutt—they had a great common virtue. They could command the press of the world.
What would happen if these brilliant Jews cried out with passion against the German butchers? […] I recited all the facts I knew about the Jewish killings. I said I felt certain that if we banded together and let loose our talents and our moral passion against the Germans we might halt the massacre. […]
There was no applause when I stopped talking. Not that I expected any. […] But the nature of the silence was revealed to me when a half-dozen of the guests stood up and without saying “Boo” walked out of the room.
“It looks like I struck out,” I said to my hostess as the silence kept up. […]
In the vestibule, Beatrice said to me, “I'm sorry it turned out like this. But I didn't expect anything much different. You asked them to throw away the most valuable thing they own—the fact that they are Americans.”
How argue with Beatrice, a fine woman with as bright a mind and as soft a heart as anyone I knew? How convince any of her high-falutin guests that they had not behaved like Americans but like scared Jews? […] Two of the thirty guests came into the vestibule to say good night to me.
“I thought I'd tell you that if I can do anything definite in the way of Jewish propaganda, call on me,” said Moss Hart.
Kurt Weill, the lone composer present, looked at me with misty eyes. A radiance was in his strong face.
“Please count on me for everything,” Kurt said. v

In Hecht's 1930s farce, Twentieth Century, an egomaniacal theater producer (played in the film by John Barrymore) proposed turning the Passion of Christ into a Broadway spectacular. And now, a decade later, Hecht - who, according to one of his newspaper cronies, “could make a breakfast egg seem theatrical” - took on a project no less imposing. vi Soon after the debacle at the Kaufmans', he resolved to take news of the mass killings straight to the American public. He would do so by means of a theatrical extravaganza: a pageant featuring stars of stage, screen, and radio, vast sets with striking scenery, an orchestra, a choir, and a cast (plus crew) of thousands. Incredibly, he delivered the goods within just over a month.

To see a video, click here.

With Moss Hart directing, Billy Rose producing, and a score composed and compiled by Kurt Weill, We Will Never Die opened for a single performance at Madison Square Garden on March 9, 1943. Twenty thousand seats swiftly sold out, and the show had to be repeated that same night, again to a full house, with sound piped outside the hall to accommodate an overflow crowd of perhaps twenty thousand more.

Hecht read in these figures “a hunger” on the part of Americans to “hear something that was not being spoken very loud in our country.” viiWith New York governor Thomas Dewey having proclaimed March 9, 1943 a day set aside to “offer prayer to Almighty God for the Jews who have been brutally massacred,” the show went on the road. viii On April 12 it was staged at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Eleanor Roosevelt attended, as did hundreds of politicians and diplomats from more than forty nations. Two days later, Mrs. Roosevelt's impressions appeared in her widely syndicated newspaper column, “My Day.”

The music, singing, narration and actors all served to make it one of the most impressive and moving pageants I have ever seen. No one who heard each group come forward and give the story of what had happened to it at the hands of a ruthless German military will ever forget those haunting words: “Remember us.” ix

As with Hecht's Reader's Digest piece, this column by the First Lady spread the word to millions of heretofore uninformed Americans. During the following three months the pageant toured to packed venues in Philadelphia (where it featured Claude Rains and Edward Arnold), Boston (with Ralph Bellamy and Howard Da Silva), Chicago (with John Garfield and Burgess Meredith), and lastly, Los Angeles (with Edward G. Robinson and Edward Arnold). Total attendance topped 100,000, and the spectacle drew such widespread media coverage that Hecht would maintain that “the news and pictures of the pageant in the press” amounted to “the first American newspaper reports on the Jewish massacre in Europe.” x


Figure 2. Scenes from the New York production.
Ben Hecht, We Will Never Die
(New York: Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, 1943), facing p. 21.
To see this image in a bigger format, click here.

The pageant's presentation at the Hollywood Bowl, on July 21, 1943, drew 10,000 spectators, among them California governor Earl Warren and a host of Hollywood celebrities and members of Los Angeles' elite. This performance, fortunately, has been preserved on a set of transcription discs made for radio broadcast in the Los Angeles area. (Never published, the discs were left by Ben Hecht's estate to the Newberry Library, Chicago. xi) Since most of the music manuscript to We Will Never Die has vanished, this recording may be as close as listeners today can come to experiencing this landmark stage production. xii

Audio 1: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen”

Kurt Weill's Contribution

The pageant is a theatrical form in which music, while essential, is subordinate to a story-line meant to advance a political or cultural agenda and to rouse an audience to action. xiii Certainly the refugee Kurt Weill (1900–1950), a veteran of culture wars in Berlin and Paris, understood music's power as a bearer of propaganda and how it might underscore Hecht's narrative. He also knew that he had little time for crafting an original score, and in fact much of his work for We Will Never Die was cobbled together from preexisting compositions. Hecht streamlined Weill's task by scripting in cues for specific works of music (including Hatikvah, Kol Nidre and various national anthems); and Weill himself made effective use of familiar Jewish, popular and patriotic motifs. From his original work, Weill drew most freely on his score for Max Reinhardt's epic The Eternal Road, the pro-Zionist, anti-Nazi Broadway production that had first brought him to the U.S. in 1935. xiv

Weill, one of the best-known émigré composers active in New York in the 1940s, had arrived on the scene with a radical-leftist reputation. Yet Weill scholar David Farneth believes that this reputation was largely a result of the composer's artistic association in Germany with the bona fide revolutionary poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht: Weill's “willingness to work on We Will Never Die,” Farneth notes, “was probably motivated more by the plight of the Jews in Europe (to whom he had an intimate connection) than by a conviction to join Hecht in supporting Peter Bergson and the Committee for a Jewish Army.” xv (Ben Hecht, however, had little doubt where the composer's sympathies lay; in his autobiography, Weill's photo is captioned “Irgun Comrade.” xvi)

Certainly Weill had supported efforts, pre–Pearl Harbor, to urge U.S. entry into the war. In 1941 he contributed the score to Fun to Be Free, a pageant by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, which was also staged at Madison Square Garden. The next year, at the request of the Office of War Information, he wrote and - with his wife, Lotte Lenya - recorded a set of anti-Nazi propaganda songs for shortwave transmission to Germany. Further patriotic efforts included incidental music for the radio program Your Navy (1942); folksong settings for the melodrama Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory (1942); and, again for the Office of War Information, the score to Jean Renoir and Garson Kanin's propaganda film, Salute to France (1944). xvii Even after the German defeat, Weill continued to support Hecht and Bergson's radical program for Jewish survival by teaming up with them again for A Flag Is Born, a propagandistic theater piece (featuring a young Marlon Brando) that opened on Broadway in 1946. He then toured the USA with the express aim of raising funds to break the British blockade of Palestine and of helping the illegal transport of Jewish Displaced Persons to Palestine. xviii

Franz Waxman's Contribution

Early in 1943, as Hecht pounded out his urgent copy, Jews inside the Warsaw Ghetto were plotting an armed rebellion against their German captors. The uprising began in earnest in April 1943, while We Will Never Die was on tour, and by the time the pageant reached its final destination in Hollywood that summer the revolt had already been brutally suppressed. xix But Hecht meanwhile seized on the news and managed to interpolate a new section containing some of his most impassioned dramaturgy and inspiring some of the pageant's best music. It should be noted, though, that the music for this section, entitled “The Battle of Warsaw” and featuring the choral song “Battle Hymn of the Ghetto” was not composed by Kurt Weill. Rather, it represents an original contribution to the pageant by its Hollywood Bowl conductor, the gifted film composer Franz Waxman (1906–1967).

A rising composer and cinema orchestrator in his native Germany, Waxman had come to the United States with the first wave of artistic émigrés soon after the Nazi advent to power. How he and the famed Broadway and Hollywood songwriter Frank Loesser became involved in We Will Never Die is a story yet to be documented. Both men, however, received prominent credit in the Hollywood Bowl program, and Waxman's efforts in particular deserve wider recognition. His newly-added music—almost a stand-alone set piece—takes as its leitmotif “Deutschland über Alles,” the Nazi anthem heard menacingly in many a film score of the day. The episode climaxes, amid a clamor of martial sound effects, with “The Hymn of the Ghetto;” somewhat incongruously, its melody was yet another transfiguration of the malevolent Teutonic theme.


Lyric Sheet for “The Battle Hymn of the Ghetto”

Audio 2: “Battle Hymn”

The End of the Pageant

The Los Angeles performance - the pageant's sixth - would also be its last. Just as Manhattan's Jewish intellectuals had rebuffed Hecht during the production's planning phase, so intramural conflict put a premature end to We Will Never Die. Hecht, seeking to publicize the pageant, had sought endorsements from Jewish organizations across the ideological spectrum, and to that end he had convened thirty-two “Jewish presidents, vice-presidents and secretaries” one afternoon at New York's Algonquin Hotel. He recalled in his autobiography:

I told my guests much the same things I had said to the thirty literary celebrities. Their eyes brightened and they straightened eagerly in their seats. I then read excerpts from the pageant, and Kurt Weill played the accompanying music on a piano. […]
No words I had ever written had ever been received with such love as beamed on me now. […]
I told my guests then that the pageant they had heard was going to be put on in Madison Square Garden, New York, and, thereafter, in a dozen other cities. We needed no money from any organizations present. […] All we wished of them was their approval. […] All we asked concretely of each organization present was as its name on our letterhead and the privilege of saying that all the Jewish organizations of New York were presenting the pageant. […]
I announced I would call the roll and asked that each official answer yes or no to the question.
The first two names I called answered in unhappy voices, “I pass.” The third called was the secretary of the American Jewish Congress.
“I wish to know,” he spoke up, “whether you are asking for my personal cooperation or the cooperation of my organization.”
“I want the yes from your organization,” I said.
The representative of the American Jewish Congress stood up, pointed a finger and cried out, “As an organization, we refuse to work with Morris Goldfarb! Never will the American Jewish Congress join up with anything in which the Arbeterring is involved!”
A man, possibly Morris Goldfarb, was on his feet yelling back, “And we will never work with the American Jewish Congress in a thousand years.”

Hecht reports that he left the room “sickened” at “the spectacle of Jews comically belaboring each other in the worst hour of their history.” xxii
During the period in question, factional passions within and among American Jewish groups may have been as much a matter of habit as ideology—a difficult habit (as Hecht observed) to break in a hurry. Yet Hecht also indicated that the leaders of these American Jewish organizations equivocated for much the same reason as the one he had previously spelled out in his tale of the Broadway notables. That is, many of them felt that publicly advocating for a so-called Jewish issue, especially in time of war, would compromise their status as “neutral Americans.” Hecht places much of the blame for fostering the mind-set that closed down his show on Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, the influential leader of the American Jewish Congress. Wise had openly condemned We Will Never Die, and other groups followed suit, anxious to disassociate themselves from Bergson's band of radicals, fearful, however irrationally, of provoking “pogroms in the U.S.A.” xxiii

Legacy

As Bergson and Hecht had anticipated, We Will Never Die captured the attention of the public and the press, and in the process unleashed a torrent of controversy. Was the show, then, a success? The question can be answered both unequivocally no, and conditionally yes. No, in that it clearly failed in its objective to establish an independent Jewish army to battle the Nazis and liberate Jews from their European deathtrap. Yet a positive outcome can also be argued from the fact that the Bergson Group's propaganda campaign tangibly affected U.S. policy toward rescuing Jews. The Holocaust historian (and Bergson biographer) Rafael Medoff has persuasively linked the production and promotion of We Will Never Die with President Roosevelt's decision, six months after the pageant's final performance, to create the War Refugee Board, specifically to “forestall the plan of the Nazis to exterminate all the Jews and other persecuted minorities in Europe.” xxiv According to Medoff's findings, reported in a study of the Hecht-Weill show prepared for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,

The War Refugee Board's activities, which included financing the rescue work of Raoul Wallenberg, played a crucial role in saving the lives of more than 200,000 people during the final 15 months of the war. We Will Never Die helped set in motion the events that led to the saving of those lives. xxv

Grateful acknowledgement is due to the Ben Hecht authority and publisher Florice Whyte Kovan, whose extensive research for an unrealized U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum web-based exhibition about We Will Never Die has contributed to the writing of this article.

  • i. Tally according to the Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0372942/ (as of July, 2010.) ↑
  • ii. Hecht on his facility and prosperity as a screenwriter: “For many years Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.” A Child of the Century, p. 467. Peter Bergson (real name, Hillel Kook), a U.S. emissary for the Irgun, befriended Hecht in April 1941 and soon convinced him to serve as a spokesman for his organization (A Child of the Century, p. 515 ff). On Bergson and his activities, see Holocaust Encyclopedia on-line: http://www1.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007041; and Rafael Medoff, Militant Zionism in America: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926–1948 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002). ↑
  • iii. See for example, Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times: the Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper (Boston: Cambridge University Press, 2005). ↑
  • iv. American Mercury 56 (February, 1943), pp. 194–99; Reader's Digest, February 1943, pp. 107-110. Hecht's primary informant was Yiddish journalist Chaim Greenberg (A Child of the Century, pp. 549–50; and Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry,” pp. 235–36). On March 12, 1943, Alabama Congressman George Grant read the Reader's Digest piece into the Congressional Record. ↑
  • v. A Child of the Century, pp. 551–53. ↑
  • vi. The quote is from the political columnist Max Lerner; cited in Rafael Medoff, “ ‘We Will Never Die': Shattering the Silence Surrounding The Holocaust,” Holocaust Encyclopedia on-line: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/index.php?ModuleId=10007036. ↑
  • vii. Ben Hecht, foreword to We Will Never Die (New York: Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, 1943), p. 5. ↑
  • viii. For Dewey's proclamation, see Isaac Kowaski, ed. Anthology of Jewish Resistance, vol. 3 p. 602. ↑
  • ix. Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” April 14, 1943. Online: http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1943&_f=md056470. ↑
  • x. A Child of the Century, p. 576. ↑
  • xi. Ben Hecht Papers, Midwest Manuscript Collection, The Newberry Library, Chicago. Another set of discs is held by Syracuse University (Franz Waxman Papers). ↑
  • xii. Weill did not prepare the score for publication; some fragments survive at the Weill/Lenya Archive, Yale University Music Library, New Haven, Conn. ↑
  • xiii Whitfield characterizes pageants as “hybrids of art and propaganda which often evoke the past in order to affect public opinion and to stimulate communal cohesion.” (“The Politics of Pageantry,” p. 221) ↑
  • xiv. On Weill's self-borrowings, see David Drew, Kurt Weill: A Handbook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 330–333. ↑
  • xv. David Farneth, “Kurt Weill and We Will Never Die,” Holocaust Encyclopedia on-line: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/index.php?ModuleId=10007047&Type=normal+article. ↑
  • xvi. A Child of the Century, p. 356↑
  • xvii. Chronology of Weill's compositions, Kurt Weill Foundation on-line (as of July 2010): http://www.kwf.org/kwf/kurt-weill/weill-works/by-date ↑
  • xviii. Rafael Medoff, “Ben Hecht's ‘A Flag is Born': A Play That Changed History,” in David S. Wyman Institute of Holocaust Studies (April, 2004); http://www.wymaninstitute.org/articles/2004-04-flagisborn.php; “When Marlon Brando Taught the Holocaust,” in David S. Wyman Institute of Holocaust Studies (April 2004); on-line: http://www.wymaninstitute.org/articles/2004-04-brando.php. ↑
  • xix. Hecht's “Madison Square Garden” script makes no reference to the Warsaw uprising (see We Will Never Die, typescript, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library). The published text gives an erroneous date (March 17, 1943) for the uprising's commencement. See “Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” Holocaust Encyclopedia on-line: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005188. ↑
  • xx. In his analysis of We Will Never Die, Drew notes that “[o]ne or two musical devices in the Ghetto sequence are surprisingly ‘advanced' by Weill's standards in the 1940s, and raise the question of a possible contribution by Waxmann [sic].” (Kurt Weill: A Handbook, p. 333). ↑
  • xxi. For Waxman's biography and discography, see Waxman Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, http://libwww.syr.edu/digital/guides/w/waxman_f.htm; and Waxman's official website, http://www.franzwaxman.com. It is hoped that additional research will reveal the origins and extent of Waxman's involvement with the pageant. ↑
  • xxii. A Child of the Century, pp.554–56. “Arbeterring” (Yiddish, Arbeter-ring, “Workmen's Circle), Jewish labor organization founded in New York City in 1900. ↑
  • xxiii “Neutral Americans,” see A Child of the Century, p. 517; “Pogroms in the USA,” see A Child of the Century, p. 565. The remark (by American Jewish Committee president Joseph M. Proskauer) was in response to Hecht's poem “Ballad of the Doomed Jews of Europe.” See Rafael Medoff, “Christmas Without Jews” in David S. Wyman Institute of Holocaust Studies (December 2003); http://www.jewishaz.com/jewishnews/031226/christmas.shtml. On Rabbi Wise and We Will Never Die, see also Walter Roth, “Peter Bergson, the Irgun, and Chicago,” in Chicago Jewish History, Fall 2001, http://www.chicagojewishhistory.org/pdf/2001/CJH.3.2001.pdf. For documentation on Wise's anti-pageant activities see David S. Wyman, America and the Holocaust, Volume 2 “The Struggle for Rescue Action” (New York: Garland, 1990), pp. 206-210 and ff. ↑
  • xxiv. “Executive Order Creating the War Refugee Board” (January 22, 1944). Online: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/wrb1.html .↑
  • xxv. Medoff, “ ‘We Will Never Die': Shattering the Silence Surrounding The Holocaust” (see fn. 6, above). See also Robert Skloot, “'We Will Never Die': The Success and Failure of a Holocaust Pageant,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 37, No. 2 (May, 1985), pp. 167-180 (http://jstor.org/stable/3207063); and David S. Wyman and Rafael Medoff, A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust (New York: New Press, 2002). ↑