»A Survivor from Warsaw« is one of Arnold Schönberg’s most expressive compositions. It’s a monumental work of shocking reality in text and music, and one of the most important and most frequently discussed analyses of the Holocaust. In just 99 bars, Schönberg describes the suffering of an entire people. The story was written by the composer himself and describes the Nazi regime’s terror based on a typical scene from Warsaw’s ghetto. For the last part of the men’s choir, he uses the Jewish declaration of faith »Shema Yisrael«.

Johannes Brahm’s idea for his requiem text is extraordinary too: He arranged parts of the Old and of the New Testament from Luther’s translation in such a way that the main ideas of »grief« and »comfort« relate to one another in a constructive way and create an interdenominational burial ceremony.