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A Princeton University seminar titled "Camp Mementos from Krystyna Zywulska: The Making of a Satirist and Songwriter in Auschwitz-Birkenau" on March 22 left one of the attendees, retired scientist Myra Weiner, wondering about Zywulska's feelings about her own Jewish identity.

According to Barbara Milewski, associate professor of music at Swarthmore College, Zywulska, nee Sonia Landau, was born in Lodz, and although her upbringing was secular, her family did maintain some Jewish traditions. As a close friend once described the Jewishness in her home, "Her mother spoke Yiddish and sometimes prepared cholent."

The riddle of Zywulska's identity as a Jew is further played out in a profile on the Jewish Women's Archive, where Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska writes about how Zywulska projects a very different self-image in her two works about World War II. In her war memoir, "I Survived Auschwitz," she presents herself as a Christian Pole, whereas in an autobiographical novel, "Empty Water," she speaks from a Jewish perspective about the Warsaw ghetto.

Commenting on Zywulska's reluctance to reveal her true identity after assuming a false one during the war, actor and writer Henryk Grynberg said: "There were many cases of Jews who after the war were afraid to admit their Jewishness, especially after such experiences as those Zywulska lived through. But this is perhaps the only known case in which a writer narrating her profoundest personal experiences and the tragedy of her people in the first person conceals her true identity from her readers. This must be considered yet another of the unprecedented tragedies of the Holocaust."

Milewski has been exploring unofficial music making that took place at Nazi camps, work that she referred to as "musical shrapnel in a culturally decimated landscape." The professor took umbrage with the academic bias against nonprofessional, utilitarian music, considering it to be inferior to art music. She disagreed about the role of unofficial musical compositions. "They are critical reportage, the stuff of historical documentation," she said. "They also reveal the unlikely birth of literary and satirical talent and affirm art to have been a fundamental aspect of their humanity."

Songs that parodied the life of the camps, she said, sometimes functioned to bear witness to the perverted system of the camp and at other times were simply an effort to maintain a level of normalcy.

Zywulska attended a Polish-language Jewish gymnasium in Lodz, and in 1938 began to study law in Warsaw, apparently unconcerned about the anti-Semitic environment. After returning home to Lodz, where violence was increasing, she managed to obtain documents to keep her family out of the Lodz ghetto. Unfortunately they were eventually caught in the Warsaw ghetto, but on Aug. 26, 1942, Zywulska daringly walked out of the ghetto with her mother. They left her father behind to have a better chance for survival -- a decision that tormented her until her dying day, said Milewski.

On the Aryan side, Zywulska joined the Polish resistance and assumed different false identities. Eventually she was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned, and ultimately taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was registered as a Polish political prisoner.

Although Zywulska had never written poetry, she began to do so at Birkenau to help herself endure the roll calls. Her fellow inmates memorized and disseminated her poem's, about which a fellow survivor said, "Krystyna's poems became very popular; they were recited everywhere, in every free moment."

One popular poem, "March Out through the Gate," sarcastically records the marching of inmates to labor details. In it she calls on inmates to persevere and offers a liberating vision of one day when the victims will be able to take revenge: "For so many victims, so much blood, you will all pay, only you! For so much suffering, so many floggings!"

An earlier roll call poem had saved her life when a well-placed prisoner, Wala Kostecka, was so moved by it that she decided to save the poet's life. When Zywulska was ill with typhus, Kostecka illegally obtained a life-saving medication for her and also arranged for her to be transferred to the Effektenkammer kommando at Birkenau. This work detail, which dealt with the personal effects of arriving prisoners, was considered less dangerous than physical work outdoors, and it also gave her access to better food, clothing, and other valuables.

But Zywulska's new work assignment also placed right on the path between the arriving freight trains and the gas chambers and crematoria. What was most difficult for Zywulska to watch was the huge Hungarian transport, where out the window she could see prisoners making their way through a bucolic forest of birch trees and playing with their children as they made their way to the gas chambers.

These scenes motivated a powerful poem that juxtaposed natural sounds and images with the grotesque reality of the camps. Another inmate set a modified version of the poem to two popular songs with very different moods, with the tunes alternating according to the content of the verses.

To "Santa Lucia," about a boatman who, moved by the beauty of the soft moon, invites people into his boat to better enjoy the evening, verses like the following were matched:

"The sun is shining, the birds are singing
Children are playing, tree branches, swaying
Life is so colorful, lovely and plentiful,
No one would want to part with this world.
On a long journey by meadow, near river
In heat and handicap, the people are walking.
Younger ones they've taken during selection,
The elderly are going for "disinfection."
Look all around you: Do you not see?
The stream ripples, the flowers grow."

To the other song, "Gloomy Sunday," a much darker piece of music, was set the lines of the poem that treated the morbid reality.

"There the devil's work is already in full swing.
After "disinfection" bodies lay on the ground. ...
One only has to watch very closely
How the fat melts, and the meat cooks,
The shovel's movement makes the bones crack.
Bodies sizzle, bones stick out,
Children's bones, innocent bones.
Here at the seance of horrors,
Here, things went mad.
A bloody crimson shot up in the air.
Death donned its finest."

Zywulska sometimes created music that was entirely different, even lighthearted, like something out of a girls' boarding school rather than a concentration camp. The following linens, for example, appeared in a booklet presented to the Kapo Marii on her name day:

"Bright is their garb, such nicely tailored striped uniforms. Oh, my dear God, how wonderful when the boys are in sight. Storage sacks shake when I sweetly begin to approach him."

After the war, Zywulska worried that uninitiated people might draw the wrong conclusion from this playful verse, and she wrote in its defense that the lines expressed a belief that freedom would come: "It was a naïve, sentimental expression of our longings, an attempt to disconnect from the realities of the camp so we could stand the hell."

Zywulska survived the camps, as did 32 complete texts of her poems. She became a satirical writer and a successful songwriter, married, and had two sons. She moved to Dusseldorf in 1968 to be with her sons as a result of the anti-Semitic campaign in Poland in the late 1960s. She died in 1992.

In response to a question from the audience, Milewski distinguished between the informal music created by Zywulska and the official music dictated by the SS command -- primarily marches played by camp orchestras to motivate the labor details going in and out of the camps.

The feelings of the prisoners toward the official music varied widely. Whereas some prisoners found this music to be a torture, with high art being defiled in the context of the camp environment, others found even the official music to be a lifesaver. Milewski noted, "There is also a lot of talk about music as way to sustain themselves, to create bonds of friendship and trust, and to provide some kind of spiritual fortitude for the prisoners."