Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day
In a 1995 interview Leonard Cohen said this about his song, 'Dance Me to the End of Love', a favourite of mine.
"...it's curious how songs begin because the origin of the song, every song, has a kind of grain or seed that somebody hands you or the world hands you and that's why the process is so mysterious about writing a song. But that song came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also. And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt. So, that music, "Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin," meaning the beauty thereof being the consummation of life, the end of this existence and of the passionate element in that consummation."
With everything I learn about the Holocaust, it's horror seems to become even more profound and crushing...how that is possible I don't know.
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