In the summer of 1948, an amateur folklorist named Ben Stonehill recorded more than 1,000 songs from Holocaust survivors in the lobby of New York City's Hotel Marseilles. This week, 66 of those songs become available online through the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, complete with translations; another 300 songs will go up over the next few months — all free for anyone to hear.

Some sing in Russian; some sing in Polish, Czech, Lithuanian, Hebrew. But the majority sing in Yiddish, a language whose speaking population was dramatically reduced during WWII. That loss is a big part of what brought Stonehill to that lobby. He was looking to capture the sound of something he'd feared might disappear.

U ljeto 1948  Ben Stonehill  kao "folklorist"- amater snimio je više od 1.000 pjesama od onih koji su preživjeli Holokaust, u lobiju hotela u New Yorku. Ovoga tjedna je 66 od tih pjesama postalo dostupno na internetu od   Center for Traditional Music and Dance, koji je završio prijevode, a slijedećih 300 pjesama će se snimiti i moći čuti  u slijedećim mjesecima. Neke su pjesme na Ruskom, neke na Poljskom,Češkom, Hebrejskom ali je većina na Jidišu, jeziku kojim je govorila populacija Židova  koja je dramatično smanjena u toku II.svjetskog rata. Stonehill je hrio uhvatiti zvukove za koje se bojao da će nestati.

Miriam Isaacs,  koja je sociolingvist je proučavala ovu kolekciju u kojoj je našla  nalaze svi moguće zvukove : Tu je plač djece, smijanje žena, zvuci ljudi koji si pomažu, katkada zajedno pjevajući"...

 
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Boys, girls and mothers would gather about the recorder and beg permission to sing into the microphone in order to hear their own voices played back. The thrill and glow that spread over their faces, and the tears that came to their eyes, was patently an admixture of witnessing an electronic miracle and having the satisfaction of knowing that their intimate, closely guarded songs from home, camp and ghetto were being preserved for academic study.

Stonehill was born in Poland, but moved to Rochester, N.Y., as a young child. He was never a professionally trained folklorist. He loved Yiddish and Jewish culture, and he nursed a quiet dream of doing something like Alan Lomax had done for American folk music — collecting songs and making sure they were preserved for future generations.

Then, in 1948, an opportunity presented itself. He'd heard that Jewish refugees were being temporarily housed at the Hotel Marseilles on the Upper West Side...