The featured song—“Hecatomb 1941”—was written by a young Soviet soldier named Aleksey “Alyosha” Sazonov. He wrote it in early 1942 when he was a seventeen-year-old prisoner of war (POW) held in German captivity.
German forces had advanced rapidly after attacking the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. They captured hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers within months. Nazi policies targeting Soviet POWs were brutal and deadly.1 The German army imprisoned most Soviet POWs in specially created POW camps, but more than 100,000 were sent to Nazi concentration camps—detention sites in Nazi Germany and German-occupied Poland that were under the control of the Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel).
The POWs sent to these concentration camps were either exploited for forced labor or killed almost immediately. German authorities transferred several thousand of these prisoners to Sachsenhausen concentration camp beginning in August 1941. Most were killed shortly after their arrival—primarily by shooting and poison gas.2 The total number of Soviet POWs murdered by the Nazi SS at Sachsenhausen is difficult to calculate, but roughly 9,000 of them were killed in September and October 1941 alone.3 By December 1941, only 1,500 Soviet POWs remained at the camp.4
Sazonov was among the Soviet POWs who were not killed immediately after arriving at Sachsenhausen in 1941. He was assigned to forced labor instead. Sazonov met a Polish political prisoner named Aleksander Kulisiewicz when he was forced to work making shoes. Both men were singers and songwriters, and Kulisiewicz made it his mission to memorize and preserve the songs of the camp’s prisoners.5 Sazonov taught him three songs that he had written.
Kulisiewicz performs the featured recording of “Hecatomb 1941”—the last song Sazonov ever wrote. It documents the mass murder of his fellow Soviet POWs at Sachsenhausen. The lyrics are mournful but defiant. Sazonov sang the first part to Kulisiewicz on their final meeting. The last thing Sazonov told Kulisiewicz was that his song should be titled “Hecatomb 1941” after the ancient Greek word for a ceremonial sacrifice involving the mass slaughter of livestock. Although Sazonov was from the city of Gorky (the present-day Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod), he based the song on a popular Ukrainian melody.6 Sazonov wrote the last of the song’s lyrics on a scrap from a bag of cement, and another prisoner smuggled them to Kulisiewicz. He only saw Sazonov alive once more and believed that the young POW was killed shortly afterward.
Many prisoners at Sachsenhausen used songs to document their experiences, express their emotions, or boost the morale of their fellow prisoners.7 People gathered to listen to other prisoners sing, and many people wrote their own songs. Kulisiewicz memorized as many as he could. He survived the war and dictated all of the songs he could remember to his nurse when he was recovering in a hospital in Poland. Kulisiewicz continued to collect and perform concentration camp prisoners’ songs for decades after the end of World War II. His last concert was in 1981.8 He died the following year.