At 91, Esther Bejarano raps against hate

An Auschwitz survivor, Esther has had a late successful career as a hip-hop artist

Dirk Wagner

We’ll live forever … in spite of our enemies,” sings 91-year-old Esther Bejarano to an audience in Hamburg, Germany. Bejarano performs the song, written in by a poet in the Jewish Ghetto of Vilnius, Lithuania, with Cologne-based hip-hop band Microphone Mafia.

“We represent three generations and three religions,” she explains. Bejarano believes people from different religions and different cultures can work together in peace. Amongst the band members is a Muslim whose parents migrated from Turkey, a Christian whose parents came from Italy and she is the Jew from Germany.

At the age of 18, Bejarano was taken to Auschwitz and there had her first public performance. Recruited for the Auschwitz Women’s Orchestra, she sang in the morning at the camp’s gate while the prisoners traipsed to the fields and in the evening when the workers returned, shattered by the hard, physical work.

She also vividly recalls the group singing for new arrivals at the camp gates – many were being led into the gas chambers. “They had no idea what was coming,” she reflects. “They probably thought: well, if they’re playing music, it can’t be that bad.”

Land of the perpetrators

As the war neared its end, Bejarano escaped and later immigrated to Israel where she studied singing. Unable to cope with the climate, she returned to Hamburg, Germany with her family in.

For many years, Bejarano was an outsider in the harbor city. She didn’t trust anyone. If she saw anyone on the street who her age or older, she wondered how many crimes he committed? “Maybe he was the one who killed my sister or my parents.”

That made me angry

For thirty years, she remained silent – until the National Democratic Party of Germany set up an information stand in front of her boutique. “That made me angry,” she recalls.

“But what made me angrier was when the police arrived. They defended the neo-Nazis against the people protesting against them. That’s when I thought: I have to do something. I have to let everyone know I’m an Auschwitz survivor.”

In, Bejarano, a co-founder of the International Auschwitz Committee and honorary chair of the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime, recorded the album Per La Vita with the band the Microphone Mafia. La Vita Continua, their second album, was released. In this compilation, hip-hop meets Jewish folklore, the songs of Italian partisans and traditional Turkish music.

The unlikely collaborators recorded an ambitious album. Harps, strings and wind instruments create a solid musical foundation that unite the singer’s voice and the rappers’ rhythmical recitative into a lyrical harmony.

The 91-year-old singer looks at her nascent hip-hop career with a sense of pride: “I’m glad I can still do something like this.”

At 91, Esther Bejarano raps against hate

An Auschwitz survivor, Esther has had a late successful career as a hip-hop artist

Dirk Wagner

At 91, Esther Bejarano raps against hate

An Auschwitz survivor, Esther has had a late successful career as a hip-hop artist

Dirk Wagner

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