Composer’s Note:

The opera is based on A Wall of Two: Poems of Resistance and Suffering from Krakow to Buchenwald and Beyond. Sisters Ilona and Henia Karmel, who were in their late teens and early 20s during their internment in Nazi concentration camps, wrote in Polish on forbidden scraps of paper smuggled out of the slave labor factories. Their poems became an important part of the clandestine cultural life in the camps. After the war, while the sisters were still convalescing in Sweden from grievous war wounds, a New York-based group of Polish Holocaust survivors published them under the title Spiew za drutami (Songs from Behind the Barbed Wire, 1947).