Arnold Schoenberg, who had been living in the United States since 1936, composed A Survivor from Warsaw for narrator, male choir and symphony orchestra in 1947. He himself wrote the text of this harrowingly concise work, lasting approx. 8 minutes. It does not have a specific plot, but rather, depicts a nightmare consisting of a whirl of memories of events that occurred at different times and in different places. The narrator recounts, in first person, the survivor’s sufferings. The location of most of the events was not in fact the Warsaw ghetto, but a concentration camp. Areveilleis held; the inmates are brutally urged on; the protagonist is beaten unconscious; he is presumed to be dead; the sergeant asks for another count, to see how many would be sent to the gas chambers; as the counting gets faster, it is interrupted by the inmates’ singing of Sh’ma Yisrael (‘Hear, O Israel’), the Jewish community’s most important prayer. The English-language narration intermingles with the sergeant barking out German commands, while the prayer is sung in Hebrew. Schoenberg noted down the precise rhythm of the narrator’s part, but not the specific pitch, as was common in Sprechgesang or ‘spoken singing’, loud, declaimed speech, which the composer employed in many other works of his.