Lodz ghetto, ca 1942
Lyrics by: Jankiel Herszkowicz
Music: traditional
Performed by Jankiel Herszkowicz
Hunger is the theme of many songs from Lodz ghetto. In Potato, Herszkowicz, characteristically finding farce within misfortune, addresses the precious vegetable in the mock-intimate tones of a badkhn (Jewish traditional wedding entertainer) crooning to an anxious bride. The ghetto audience would have understood the line “Instead I'll get a visa” (stanza 2) to mean “Instead, I'll go to the graveyard,” or, still less euphemistically, “I'll starve to death.” Herszkowicz recorded the song for Polish radio in 1965.
Lodz (article in the USHMM’s Holocaust Encyclopedia)