Monthly Archive

Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust. J. Mackenzie Pierce. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2025.

Reviewed by Nicolette van den Bogerd

J. Mackenzie Pierce’s monograph Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust offers an in-depth examination of the social and political forces that shaped musical life in Poland from the 1920s through the early 1950s. Central to Pierce’s inquiry is uncovering how and why musicians, scholars, and critics who were active during these decades viewed Polish music during the Holocaust not as a rupture in the cultural development of the nation but rather as a marker of progress and continuity that continued to build into the postwar period. By reconstructing the lives and activities of Poland’s musical community, both at home and abroad, Pierce shows how a generation of musicians and scholars formed a “musical intelligentsia” that adopted narratives of continuity to reinforce a collective sense of identity and cultural resilience in the face of war trauma. However, Pierce also argues that this process of cultural reinvention marginalized Poland’s Jewish musicians, who, despite their longstanding contributions to Polish musical life, were largely excluded from these constructions of national identity.