Joseph Toltz, Galit Klas, Adam Starr
Bucharest, 1945: a small team of Polish Jews are gathered in a house set up by the American JOINT to support recently liberated survivors of the camps and ghettos. While compiling testimonies from those who come for food, provisions, and advice for safe places to resettle, they also gather songs of wartime experience, which are collected and printed in a short run.
Sydney, 2013: one of these fragile songbooks is found in the estate of a survivor in Sydney, preserved from deterioration by chance, pressed between pages of another music score. It is one of only 5 remaining copies in the world. Thirteen years later, the book is reborn as Out of the Depths: the first collection of Holocaust songs.
The finale to Melbourne Jewish Book Week is conceived by the 2026 book’s co-author Joseph Toltz in association with Galit Klas, Adam Starr and other brilliant Melbourne creatives and klezmorim. Melodies from survivors are woven around the wartime narrative of the editor Yehuda Eismann, the custodian Olga R, and the designer of the book, Flora Romm.
As Professor Marcia Langton AM noted in her keynote launch of the book in June, the songs “capture experiences at a temporal proximity rarely available in written testimony. A single object retained among personal belongings becomes a material anchor for reconstructing an entire cultural history. It is a testament to the enduring power of cultural resistance.”