Singing up the Past: the songs of Guta Goldstein

In April 2008 I met Guta Goldstein, a sprightly, diminutive 78 year old with a twinkle in here eye, a wonderful singing voice, a prodigious memory, and a practice of using her vocal repertoire to recall loved ones from the past. Born in the city of Łódź (Poland), she lost her mother at age 7, her father at age 11 and her 7-year-old sister Munia at age 12. Guta survived the privations of the Łódź ghetto for almost 5 years. During the September 1942 Groyse Shpere (a terrible round up of the elderly, the sick and children), her aunt Golda saved Guta’s life by smuggling her and her cousins out of the children’s home, moving every night from attic to attic during that terrible week of terror. In 1944, Guta and the remainder of her family in Poland were transported to Auschwitz, where Golda was sent immediately to the gas chamber. After two months avoiding selection, she, with her cousins Inka and Carmela, volunteered to go to Bergen-Belsen. One day in this camp, she noticed a man drawing up a list of volunteers to go work in a slave labour camp in the Vogtland region of Lower Saxony. Guta quickly put her hand up when a request came for sisters to join the workforce, and this savvy move on the part of a 14-year-old was, in her words, a godsend. Survival in Mehltheuer was more or less guaranteed, as it was a civilian-run factory providing essential parts for the Wehrmacht (German army), with heated barracks provided for the forced labourers. Guta and her friends were liberated by the American Army in April 1945, and she and her cousin Inka decided to head to Italy, where they could make a decision on where to go. Poland was not safe for Jews after the war - the Kielce Pogrom of 1946 all but confirmed this. Palestine was an option, but eventually they decided on Australia, arriving in 1949. Guta met her future husband Ludek in Melbourne, and they were married in 1954. They had two daughters: Jessica and Michelle, and Guta now has seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Guta’s prodigious memory for songs (at last count, 45 memorised - maybe even more!) was of particular interest to me when I was collecting musical memories from survivors as part of my doctoral thesis, and her songs were a major contribution to the final dissertation, as well as articles in Holocaust Studies and Polin journals. In 2009 Guta and I travelled to Thursday Island together to talk to students at Tagai Secondary College. Even on the landing strip waiting for the plane home, Guta shared a new musical memory with me.

For many years I tried to think about ways in which to bring Guta’s songs to a larger audience. In 2017 I wrote a script for a children’s play. In 2019 I spoke to the Yiddish Association Kadimah about staging it. Then in July 2019, I approached my friend, the award-winning documentary film-maker Tim Slade, to see if he might be interested in making a film about Guta. Tim spoke to Guta, and was instantly charmed. We started talking to Joanna Podolska of the Marek Edelman Dialog Center in Łódź, and were introduced to the Children’s Choir of the City of Łódź.

And then … the pandemic struck All our ideas of taking Guta to Poland went out the window. But the idea didn’t fade - it took a new life. We continued to talk with the choir; we investigated places for filming and staging, and Tim travelled to Australia to meet Guta in person, filming her at home discussing her survival story and her songs. I gave him my early recordings of her singing. In 2023, I travelled to Poland, meeting Tim and the many other amazing creatives he had gathered, and we went to work for an intensive week of production, choir rehearsals, and filming in various places. I don’t think i slept more than 6 hours a night that week - the rest of the time i was running on adrenaline and excitement.

We brought back a first cut of the film to Melbourne, to show supporters in August 2023, with proud partners and parents in attendance. Sadly Guta couldn’t make it - she was in hospital with a very serious medical condition, but recovered well. Tim soon completed his film festival edit and we started to enter, and enter, and enter, and enter. October 7 did nothing to assist our efforts. Despite our resolute refusal to associate our film with anything political, no-one seemed interested until the Jewish International Film Festival took us up, and screened the 26 minute documentary in November 2024.

Here’s a taster. We’re still hoping to screen it somewhere other than Australia. It has been shown in Poland at an academic conference in Łódź, and sound from the film was featured in an exhibition at the Ehmaliges Jüdisches Waisenhaus Pankow (Pankow Former Jewish Orphanage) on 17-18 November, 2025, as part of the Jüdische Ossis III.