Sold Date: January 2, 2024
Start Date: June 28, 2018
Final Price: $350.00 (USD)
Seller Feedback: 15543
Buyer Feedback: 0

This item is not for sale. Gripsweat is an archive of past sales and auctions, none of the items are available for purchase.

Behind the Barbed Wire.  Six Songs of Concentration Camps.  Sung by Bart van der Schelling and the Exiles Chorus.  Produced by the League of American Writers for the benefit of its exiled writers committee.  Directed by Earl Robinson.
3 records.  78 rpm.  Set is complete.
From Time Magazine, 4th August 1941:

World War II has yet to produce a great song, but last week some of its saddest were heard in the U.S. The League of American Writers produced an album of records ($2.75) called Behind the Barbed Wire—six songs of the French, Spanish, Italian and German anti-Fascists who now rot in the French concentration camps of Gurs, Vernet d'Ariège, Argelès-sur-Mer. 

The six songs were recorded in Manhattan by a Netherlands-born fighter in the Spanish Civil War, Bart van der Schelling. He wears his chin in a brace, is called "official singer" for the U.S. survivors of the International Brigades of the Loyalists. Singer van der Schelling is backed by an "Exiles Chorus" directed by Earl Robinson (Ballad for Americans). Some of the songs—the Spanish Joven Guardia, the Italian Guardia Rossa, the German Thaelmann-Bataillon, the French Au Devant de la Vie (music by Soviet Composer Dmitri Shostakovich)—were composed during the Spanish War. Most of them are in rough, plodding march time.
Title/Info:  Exactly the same as pictured.  Pictures may not show all flaws.  (Top Shelf)