A concert in the Into the Light series

The NIHZ Ensemble and friends

Sanna van Elst - vocals and recorders

Bobby Rootveld - vocals and guitar

Orna Baina - percussion

Levi Rootveld - vocals and percussion

Artem Nizhnik - accordion

Gergö Pázmándi - clarinet and saxophone

Songs of Resistance, Hope and Cabaret

The music of Dutch-Jewish composers and artists who continued to create and perform throughout the Holocaust

 In recent decades, works by Jewish composers, poets and performers who lived and created across Europe before and during the Nazi era have gradually re-emerged from archives and private collections. The Out of the Depths project is dedicated to locating these works and bringing them back to the concert stage through live performance.

Ensemble NIHZ from the Netherlands presents a programme devoted to Dutch Jewish music from the Holocaust period. The concert brings together songs and compositions written in Amsterdam, Westerbork, Bergen-Belsen and labour camps, and explores the work of composers, songwriters and performers whose lives and artistic activity were profoundly affected by the Nazi occupation.

At the centre of the programme are the works of Dutch Jewish composer Rob (Robert Emanuel) Heilbut (1909-1945), who wrote thirty-six songs between 1942 and 1945. Created in Amsterdam's Jewish Quarter, the Westerbork transit camp and Bergen-Belsen, his songs reflect daily life under persecution, uncertainty and fear, while also revealing humour, love and hope. Following more than a decade of research, reconstruction and documentation, these works can once again be heard in performance.

Alongside Heilbut's music, the programme includes songs by Johnny & Jones, among the most popular musical acts in Amsterdam during the 1930s, who continued to write and perform while imprisoned in Westerbork. The concert also features works based on texts by Phida Wolff, written during his imprisonment in German labour camps following the Rotterdam raid of November 1944, as well as songs associated with the Dutch Jewish singer Leo Fuld, whose career spanned both the war years and the post-war revival of Jewish musical culture. 

Through the works of Heilbut, Johnny & Jones, Phida Wolff, Leo Fuld and other artists, the programme offers a perspective on Jewish musical life in the Netherlands during the Holocaust. Combining cabaret, popular song, poetry and Jewish musical traditions, it brings together personal stories and artistic voices that continued to create under conditions of persecution and war.

Ensemble NIHZ, founded in 2001 by Bobby Rootveld and Sanna van Elst, combines performance and historical research with a particular focus on Jewish culture, chamber music and cabaret. The ensemble has performed in more than thirty-five countries and places particular emphasis on recovering music and voices that have disappeared from the repertoire. 

The programme is based on research conducted over more than a decade in archives, museums and private collections in the Netherlands, Germany, Israel, the United States and Australia. As part of this work, members of the ensemble interviewed Holocaust survivors including Hetty Verolme, Ro Horneman, Ernst Verduin, Ester Debora Reiss and Mirjam Bolle, and reconstructed Heilbut's songs while carefully tracing the style and instrumentation he employed. The project resulted in a trilingual publication in Dutch, English and German, as well as a three-CD collection. Heilbut's story also has a special connection to Haifa, where descendants of his brother live today.