THE LONELY CHILD is a feature documentary that tells the story of a little-known Yiddish lullaby “Dos Elnte Kind” written inside the Vilna Ghetto during the Holocaust. Over 75 years later, the daughter of the girl in the song — Alix Wall — goes on a global quest to find those keeping the song alive today, inviting musicians from around the world to perform their own interpretations of it. Through conversations and performance, the lullaby serves as a vehicle to explore themes of inherited memory and trauma, music and art as resistance, and the song’s surprising relevance amid today’s global refugee crisis. What starts as a personal family story of discovery becomes a large-scale music film that brings together artists from different parts of the world around common themes.
Shmerke Kaczerginski — the writer of “Dos Elnte Kind” — was a poet and partisan in Vilna who wrote the lyrics to some 230 songs. Members of the Yiddish cultural scene in Vilna, he and Alix’s grandmother, Rachela Pupko-Krinsky, were handpicked by the Nazis to sort through Jewish objects for their planned “Museum of an Extinct Race.” Often called “The Paper Brigade,” they are lesser-known heroes in Holocaust history who saved precious Yiddish manuscripts by hiding them under floorboards of the YIVO and smuggling them back into the ghetto. It was against this backdrop that Kaczerginski and Pupko-Krinsky fell in love, inspiring him to write “Dos Elnte Kind” about Rachela’s hidden daughter, Sarah, or Sorele, in 1943.
While they both survived the war, Rachela chose to marry another man and rarely spoke of the song.
“In ordinary times each song would probably have travelled a long road to popularity. But in the ghetto we observed a marvelous phenomenon: individual works transformed into folklore before our eyes.” - Shmerke Kaczerginski | Partisan, Poet and Songwriter
As the only child from this legacy, and a journalist, Alix long felt a writer’s burden around sharing her family story. When her musician friend, Felicia Sloin, offered to sing at her mother’s memorial, Alix suggested “Dos Elnte Kind,” not knowing how this would change the course of her life. Nearly 15 years later, Felicia sent Alix a video clip of a Jewish Day School class in Northampton, Massachusetts to whom she taught “Dos Elnte Kind.” Seeing those children perform her mother’s song helped Alix see her family story anew — through the power of one song.
Because Alix is a childfree woman, she was especially touched by this stanza: “If someday a mother you’ll be, you must make your children aware of how we suffered.” It was not lost on her that the song will outlive us all, potentially acting as a bridge to the future.
While thinking of the power of the song, she recalled a connection to Hannah Yarmarkov, a woman from Johannesburg who learned the song as a child. Their connection prompted Alix to research who else was performing “Dos Elnte Kind.” Much to her delight, she uncovered a new generation of artists performing unique renditions of the song. Suddenly, Alix found her family project — to probe the song’s unexpected global footprint and seed it to grow further.
Taking cues from films with an on-screen guide as the main character, Alix’s personal story serves as the investigative lens from the very first shot. We see her forge connections over Zoom, creating a slate of musical endeavors that portray the song’s imprint. From there, we travel to meet those with an intimate connection to the song and now to her.
Along the way, we look closely at the Paper Brigade, focused on the role that women like Pupko-Krinsky played in Holocaust resistance. The film will feature stories and musicians from the United States, Canada, Poland, Germany, Lithuania, Israel, and South Africa.
The film’s urgency is highlighted by the fact that we are poised to lose the last living Holocaust survivors in the coming few years. Performances will be beautifully filmed in locations of great significance to the Holocaust, like the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, so such places that remind us of horror can be reclaimed by musicians and artists who encourage a new kind of historical remembrance founded on cross-cultural creativity and collective, cross-generational contemplation.
