Bejarano & Microphone Mafia - Per La Vita

Esther Bejarano, a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp who devoted much of her life to the fight against antisemitism and racism, has died. She was 96.
Mereon Mendel, the director of the Anne Frank Educational Center in Frankfurt, Germany, said Saturday that Bejarano died overnight. 

Microphone Mafia is an early German-Turkish-Italian rap group that formed in Cologne in 1989. At the beginning, the main characteristic of the group was the simultaneous use of German , Italian , Neapolitan , Turkish and English. In 1992, under the impressions of the riots in Rostock-Lichtenhagen , the band, whose members mainly come from guest worker families, became increasingly politicized .

In 2007 Kutlu Yurtseven got in touch with Holocaust survivor Esther Bejarano to start a musical project together.  The first joint rehearsals are successful and Bejarano's children Edna Bejarano , former singer of the band Rattles and Joram Bejarano quickly decide to take part in the project. Both played anti-fascist songs with their mother in the band Coincidence. The five members took songs from both bands as well as songs from the labor movement such as Bella Ciao and Jewish folk songs and revised them with contemporary texts. 

In 2009 the album "Per la Vita" was released via Mad Butcher Records and Al-Dente Recordz, which contained eleven songs. Afterwards the band played more than 170 concerts with different line-ups. The performances are divided into two parts: first Esther Bejarano reads part of her biography, then the musicians enter the stage and the hip-hop part begins.

The crossover of modern hip-hop and traditional Jewish folklore turned out to be quite a hit. The rappers have mixed Jewish songs with stomping hip-hop beats and also created new lyrics for some of the songs that are more accessible for a younger audience.

“It’s a clash of everything: age, culture, style,” Bejarano, a petite lady with an amiable chuckle, told ahead of Auschwitz Liberation Day some years ago. “But we all love music and share a common goal: we’re fighting against racism and discrimination.”

The daughter of a Jewish cantor from Saarbruecken in western Germany, Bejarano grew up in a musical home studying piano until the Nazis came to power and tore her family apart. Bejarano was deported to Auschwitz, where she became a member of the girls’ orchestra, playing the accordion every time trains full of Jews from across Europe arrived at the death camp.

“We played with tears in our eyes,” Bejarano remembered. “The new arrivals came in waving and applauding us, but we knew they would be taken directly to the gas chambers.”

Bejarano survived, but her parents and sister Ruth were killed by the Nazis.

Tracklist:

1 Schalom
2 Avanti Popolo
3 Karli Kayin
4 Schlachthof
5 Zu Ejns, Zwej, Draj
6 Die Ballade Der Verhassten Liebe
7 Adama, Admati
8 Viva La Liberta
9 Deserteur
10 Adio Querida
11 Bella Ciao

Bejarano & Microphone Mafia - Per La Vita

(320 kbps, cover art included)