Jura Soyfer, Austria, biography

Summary

Jura Soyfer was born in 1912 in Kharkov, Russia. On June 23, 1938, Soyfer was taken to Dachau as prisoner number 16,600; on September 23, 1938 he was relocated to Buchenwald, where he died on February 16, 1939.

Soyfer, whose father was a Jewish industrialist, had fled Russia with his family in 1920 and settled in Vienna in 1921. He had already displayed a strong political involvement during his studies in Vienna and wrote aggressive verse as well as left-wing critical commentaries and stage plays before, at only twenty-six years old, he was murdered in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

One of his later fellow prisoners in Dachau, Josef Schneeweiss (p. 143), describes in his autobiography Keine Führer, keine Götter (No Führers, No Gods) an encounter with Soyfer before deportation in Vienna: “The intellectual influence of the socialist movement on the youth was tremendous. Personalities like Otto Bauer and Max Adler fascinated us. I was a blond lad with light eyes from a bourgeois household, a good speaker, and soon belonged to the core of our group. This attracted talented young people from other regions, including Jura Soyfer, the poet who died young….”

Horst Jarka writes the following about the origin of Soyfer's famous “Dachau-Lied” in his biography of the young poet, published in 1987: “From this spirit of resistance, on a hot, hard workday in the gravel pit in August 1938, his ‘Dachau Song’ was born. It wasn't meant to be sung at assemblies that were allowed, but there were others. Repeatedly, political prisoners came together in small groups, no bigger than five to seven comrades….” Max Hoffenberg recalls: “One day Jura took me and some others to the ‘vegetable garden’ behind the last barrack. There, where we often sojourned on Sundays before roll-call, he read us his Dachau Song, which he had furtively written—I don't know when or where, because we spent literally every minute together—….” Jarka provides information about the song's reception: “This last poem of Jura Soyfer was set to music and distributed by his fellow prisoner Herbert Zipper, who was known as a composer under the pseudonym Walter Drix. Despite the associated dangers, the song spread swiftly across the camp, where it was sung, not publicly but rather in close circles of political prisoners, who identified with the spirit of the song….”