Behind the song
The song’s story
The children had a counselor
Miriam Harel was seventeen when she led a group of thirty children, aged eight to ten, in the Łódź ghetto. World ORT records her account of the September 1942 deportation that took the children away. Her song remembers people she had actually known.
A childhood melody transformed
Harel set her words to a Polish children's tune associated with wonder at the world. Against that familiar melody, the new words about hunger and deportation become especially painful. ORT preserves Harel herself singing it in a 1985 recording by Gila Flam.
Olga's Russian voice of remembrance
Olga Anikina's 2017 adaptation gives the remembrance a new poetic form: an indifferent sun, a dark railway carriage and children disappearing into the distance. Elechka performs this Russian recording. Those images are Olga's writing, not quotations from Harel's testimony.
Carry this text into English
Children on the Train is one of our five priority Holocaust-remembrance songs. The linked English recording is a draft reference. Our invitation is to carry Olga's Russian images and emotional movement into a stronger, singable English version.
About this recording
Children pass through sunlight in a train. Yellow patches, worn shoes and the carriage's departure make the simple words increasingly unbearable. The narrator asks where they are going; the trains disappear without an answer.
Miriam Harel wrote the source song after the September 1942 deportation from the Łódź Ghetto, using a Polish children's melody. Elechka performs Olga Anikina's 2017 Russian poetic adaptation.