The project page for this work can be accessed here: Remembering Steel Skies Raining Tears

"Child of the Night" is the fourth part of the larger multi-movement composition “Remembering Steel Skies Raining Tears” for string quartet. It can also be played very effectively as a stand-alone work. “Remembering Steel Skies Raining Tears” and "Child of the Night" are based on interviews with child survivors of the Holocaust/Shoah. For more information and an overview of the project, go to the “Remembering Steel Skies Raining Tears” project page here.

"Child of the Night" was written to honour the children, and one child in particular, who were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. In a speech in Possen in October 1943, Himmler told the elite officers of the SS that they would ensure the destruction of European Jewry by also killing all of their children. Children were particularly targeted because of Himmler's warped fears that a new generation of Jewish people might later one day emerge to seek revenge on the Nazis for their acts. 

It is extremely difficult to conceptually encompass the enormous size and scope of Nazi war crimes. In response to this difficulty, I have created music to commemorate the memory of just one child of the more than 1.6 million children (making up 93% of all Jewish children then living in Europe) who died in the Shoah. The child whose death at the hands of the Nazis is commemorated in this work is Basha Boraks, the younger sister of Lillian Boraks-Nemetz. 

In her 2015 testimony, the poet and writer Lillian Boraks-Nemetz describes how her father managed to smuggle both of his daughters out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Lillian survived with great difficulty in the Polish countryside while her young sister, in similar circumstances, was betrayed to the Nazis and then murdered at the age of 5 by a Polish police officer. This officer, it was discovered, was coerced into the act by having a gun held to his head by a Nazi Gestapo officer who told the Polish man to shoot the child Basha or be shot himself. 

“Child of the Night” is largely written in the Misheberak Scale (Ukrainian Dorian mode). This scale features an augmented second between the third and fourth notes similar to the minor blues scale. There is a downward-falling figure with a grace note that dominates the background of the music along with the persistent tension of a 3:2 polyrhythm. The expressive melodic character of the violin and viola melodies evokes the innocence of young children. Much of the music of this movement is inspired by the poem “Laughing Skeletons” by Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, published by Ronsdale Press in the volume “Ghost Children.” A particular influence from this poem on the work can be found at the end of the composition. Here the music melodically uses artificial harmonics within the Ukrainian Dorian mode to embody the ghostly spiritual vision that Lillian Boraks-Nemetz eerily creates in this poem.