Song of Songs
Lyrics: Iakovos Kambanellis
Music: Mikis Theodorakis
Look how beautiful my beloved is
Wearing her everyday dress
And a small comb in her hair.
No one knew how beautiful she really was.
Young women of Auschwitz,
Dauchau’s young women
Have you not seen my beloved?
We saw her starting a long journey
No longer was she wearing her dress
Nor the small comb in her hair.
Look how beautiful my beloved is,
So pampered by her mother
And her brother’s sweet kisses.
No one knew how beautiful she really was.
Women of Mauthausen,
Women of Belsen,
Have you not seen my beloved?
We saw her at the freezing plaza
With a number on her snow white arm,
And a yellow star laid on her heart.
Look how beautiful my beloved is,
So pampered by her mother
And her brother’s sweet kisses.
No one knew how beautiful she really was.
Denial
Lyrics: George Seferis
Music: Mikis Theodorakis
There at the hidden coast
As white as a dove
We thirsted in the afternoon
But the water was salt.
On top of the golden sand
We wrote her lovely name
The wind blew so wonderfully
And our words were gone.
With what heart, with what breathe,
What longing and what passion
We lived our lives. Wrong!
So we changed how we lived.
Old Streets
Lyrics: Manolis Anagnostakis
Music: Mikis Theodorakis
Old streets, that I had loved, and I had hated endlessly
I would walk underneath the shadows of those houses
During nights of my return, inescapable in the dead city
My insignificant existence I find at every corner,
Let me meet you again sometime, oh spirit lost from my passion and I
Forgotten and untamed, I wander holding a trembling spark in my sweating palms
And so I wandered throughout the night, without knowing anyone
And no one knew me, and no one knew me or recognized me at all
It is raining in the poor neighborhood
Lyrics: Tasos Livaditis
Music: Mikis Theodorakis
The small and sunless alleys
And my lowly neighborhood,
Raining, down in those poor places
Raining, also in my heart
Oh you lying, unfair world
You have lit a fire in my heart
You are small and cannot contain
My sigh, my very deep sigh
The countless misfortunes,
The world can give us no more
My days pass full of hardship
Like the droplets of the rain
Antonis
Lyrics: Iakovos Kambanellis
Music: Mikis Theodorakis
There in the broad steps
The steps stained with tears
There in the deep Wiener Graben
The deep quarry of mourning
Where the Jews and the rebels walk
Where the Jews and the rebels fall
Rocks they carry on their backs
Rocks that promise them death.
There Antonis hears a voice
A voice, a voice he hears
Oh comrade, oh comrade
Help me to go up the steps.
But there in the broad steps
There in the steps of tears
That kind of help is such a curse
That kind of help is peril.
The Jew falls to the ground
And his blood soaks the steps
And you, proud man come here
Carry two loads of stones.
Two I will take, and even three
Me, they call me Antoni
And if you’re a man, come here
Down to this marble arena.
– Translated by Christina Missler