Austrian composer and enfant terrible of music theory Arnold Schönberg fled his country in 1933, because of the racist laws implemented by the Nazi regime. While on vacation in France, he decided to not return to Germany. In a Paris synagogue, he reclaimed his Jewish religion and travelled to the US. Upon arrival, he changed his name to the more Americanised version: Schoenberg.
Schoenberg was already an established name in the country, and he quickly found work. First in Boston, later in Los Angeles. There he wrote A survivor from Warsaw in 1947. It was premiered the next year. The short vocal work is a memorial to the holocaust, and addresses the atrocities by the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto.
In a speaking voice, the narrator tells of the Jewish inhabitants being chased out of their houses, lined up in the streets (and beat because they didn’t do it fast enough) where they had to count themselves so the guards knew how many would be taken to the death camps. The counting need to be faster, and at the end of the short work turned into the chanting of the Shema Yisrael, a Jewish prayer. In vacating the ghetto, the Nazis killed 13000 of its inhabitants.