MUSIC | ARTS | ROLAND BINET | BELGIUM | LATVIA | COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED
◊
Editor’s note: At our request, Defending History’s longstanding correspondent Roland Binet compiled this provisional list of his musical and video creations over the years relevant to issues covered by DH. Although Roland Binet has contributed to DH since 2010 there is an aspect of his work perhaps unknown to our readers. He has been a creative musician for more than fifty years playing mostly the flute and has composed more than a hundred pieces of original music. His music is based on modal, pentatonic, Chinese or Japanese scales as well as aleatory contemporary improvisations with periodic jazz influences. He has made his jazz multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy’s quote on his last album “When you hear music and it is over, you can never capture it again”. But, of course, thanks to the numerous recordings he made, these aleatory instants can be heard on purely musical sites such as Reverbnation or Bandcamp. After his initial visit to Riga in 2009 and the shock he felt when he looked for the first time at pictures of the Liepaja massacre at the Riga Jewish Museum he took to studying the history of the Holocaust in the Baltic States. From there it was only a small step to play and compose music in honor of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had paid with their lives and belongings for the crime of being Jewish in countries that chose to collaborate enthusiastically with the Nazi killers.
◊
◊
by Roland Binet (De Panne, Belgium)
I began contributing to Defending History in the autumn of 2010. I have written articles dealing primarily with the Holocaust in the Baltic states. Firstly, to keep alive the memory of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish victims slain not only by the Nazi forces but also by local inhabitant collaborators in the Baltic states. Secondly, to combat the rampant revisionism, the rewriting of the history of World War II. This is particularly salient in Latvia and Lithuania, countries whose elites in government, education, media, the arts and more have been unable to come to terms with their past. They have engaged in contortions and distortions that multiply the historical evil by present-day efforts to twist the history and export their revisionism right to the West’s own historiography and culture of remembrance.
Apart from my opinion pieces published in Defending History, I have had the opportunity to create works of art focused on the Holocaust in the Baltics. These can be divided into two categories: (1) musical compositions, (2) videos comprising Holocaust stills with my own compositions as background music. Over a length of time, these have been posted on different websites, musical sites as well as on Youtube.
Genuine heroes of this saga—both written out of the film
(Fürther Rav) was buried in the Har Hamenuchos Cemetery in Jerusalem. A picture of his tombstone can be found in Moshe Rosenfeld’s recently published book on Rabbi Spiro. The book’s thirteen chapters cover in great detail the origins of the family Spiro, their pre-war life in Poland, the Warsaw Ghetto, survival, rebuilding, dialogue with a bishop, divorce cases and much more.