by Ruth Reches
Most people probably know the song “Dance Me to the End of Love” written in 1984 by Leonard Cohen. Many people consider it a love song with its up and down melody. Leonard Cohen, however, wrote the song as a hymn to death.
Consider the first line in the song: ”
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin.”
When prisoners at some concentration camps were selected for and taken to be murdered, a group of prisoners played violins to mask the sounds of people being slaughtered. The classical music performed erased the border between beauty and the horrific, between life and death.
Looked at from this perspective, other parts of the song also bring to mind symbols and signs of death and the afterlife, for example, “Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in,” and “Dance me to the children who are asking to be born.”
This song is a tincture of recall, not letting us forget the agony suffered by millions of people who were murdered at the Nazi crematoria.
For more on this song, see:
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa10008
and