World premiere: April 7, 2002, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, WA, at Music of Remembrance's Holocaust Remembrance Day concert. Recording: Camp Songs is available on the MOR CD, Art from Ashes, Vol. 1 (Innova), with the composer at the piano, joining vocalists Julie Mirel, mezzo-soprano, and Erich Parce, baritone, along with MOR musicians Mikhail Shmidt, violin; Laura DeLuca, clarinet; David Tonkonogui, cello; and Jonathan Green, doublebass.

Camp Songs is a setting of five poems written in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp during World War II. The poems are part of an extensive collection of music, art and poetry by hundreds of camp prisoners, compiled by Aleksander Kulisiewicz, a non-Jewish Polish survivor who was incarcerated because of his politics. After liberation, Kulisiewicz devoted his life to collecting these works, which are now housed in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. MOR Artistic Director Mina Miller discovered the collection while doing research in the Museum's archives. She decided, "There was no question that I wanted Schoenfield to do something with this."

Miller and Schoenfield met in July 2000 at the Museum to delve into the collection, with the guidance of resident musicologist Bret Werb. Schoenfield selected five poems, all by Kulisiewicz himself. Schoenfield was especially drawn to the mocking, sarcastic ones. As he told a Seattle public radio audience, "When I saw the movie The Producers, I decided that if I were ever going to express my anger to God about the Holocaust, it would be like that."

Camp Songs challenges the expectations of even the most hardened student of Holocaust art. Schoenfield has selected poems that lay bare the raw life and fury seething beneath the terrors of the camps. "The poems that I am setting," he writes, "are caricatures which (in Joseph Conrad's words) 'put the face of a joke upon the body of truth.' They are an affirmation of dignity; a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him."

Camp Songs received its world premiere at MOR's Holocaust Remembrance Day concert on April 7, 2002, at Benaroya Hall. Mina Miller, to whom the work is dedicated, was the pianist for that performance. Camp Songs was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Music. The work, in a new English translation by Katarzyna Jerzak, was featured at MOR's concert on November 8, 2004, marking the 66th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

Paul Schoenfield, composer and pianist, fulfilled both roles for the May 12, 2008, world premiere of his second MOR commission, Ghetto Songs, a work based on the poetry of the beloved Polish "troubadour," Mordecai Gebirtig, murdered in the Krakow ghetto. His first MOR commission, Camp Songs, was a chamber music setting of five poems written by the political dissident Aleksander Kulisiewicz, while imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp during World War II. Recorded on MOR's first CD, Art from Ashes, Vol. 1 (Innova), Camp Songs was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Music. (The disc itself was nominated for a 2003 Grammy Award.) Born in 1947 in Detroit, MI, Schoenfield studied piano with Julius Chajes, Ozan Marsh, and Rudolf Serkin, and holds a degree from Carnegie-Mellon University, as well as a Doctor of Music Arts degree from the University of Arizona. He has lived on a kibbutz in Israel and was a freelance composer and pianist in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. As a composer, Schoenfield has received commissions and grants from the NEA, the Ohio Arts Commission, Chamber Music America, the Rockefeller Fund, the Minnesota Commissioning Club, American Composers Forum, Soli Deo Gloria of Chicago, and many other organizations. Though he rarely performs now, he has toured the United States, Europe, and South America as a solo pianist and with ensembles. Among his recordings are the complete violin and piano works of Bartok with Sergiu Luca. His compositions can be heard on the Angel, Decca, Innova, Naxos, Vanguard, EMI, Koch, BMG, and New World labels. Paul Schoenfield's music was first heard at a MOR concert in November 1999, which featured the West Coast premiere of Sparks of Glory. He joined MOR's Advisory Board in January 2000.