Auschwitz survivor teams up with rap band
Esther Bejarano, one of last survivors of Auschwitz Girls' Orchestra, goes on tour in Germany with hip hop duo Microphone Mafia to keep memory of Holocaust alive
At age 86 she has joined forces with a hip hop band to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. Bejarano and the Microphone Mafia band are now on tour through Germany.
Video courtest of jn1.tv
"I decided to go with the rappers because now it is very modern to reach young people," she says. "Nobody until now has done something like this, that an old woman like me goes together with rappers."
"It is certainly a bit different from what I normally do," Bejarano told Jewish News One, referring to her music partners Kutlu Yurtseven and Rossi Pennino of Microphone Mafia, a hip hop duo. "I am not rapping. The two boys are raping and I am singing. They are making very wonderful speeches," she says.
At the beginning it was very weird, the rappers told Jewish News One, but before long the unlikely group realized that they were on to something, and they really began to see how music is able to bring people together.
"It’s very interesting and very good, because we also want to show that young people and older people can be together, can work together and live together," Bejarano says.
"I have been in the concentration camp, I have been in Auschwitz and I’m strictly against the Nazis, and I hope that the Holocaust will never be forgotten. We should never forget what happened then and we want to explain what happened, and therefore I'm doing the concert."
With her music, Esther Bejarano passes on to the next generation the responsibility to remember and ensure that the stories of the Holocaust never die. She herself escaped from a death march just days before the war ended, but both her parents and her only sister died in the Holocaust.
