Introduction & Context
I felt bad not doing a World War II song in all of this, but I had not been able to find a good one until today. I was going back over the Wikipedia list I've been using, and noticed "Red Sector A" by the band Rush (2009). I had a friend previously recommend this band to me, so I went to check out the song. It's definitely a terror-filled look at WWII, because its focus is on the Holocaust and those taken to the camps. Here's a video a fan put together of pictures/video clips that fit with the song (so if that kind of stuff really bothers you, just listen to the song without watching the video).
Commentary
I am going to do this commentary a little differently. Instead of talking about sections of the song or the song as a whole, I'm going to take lines in the lyrics that stand out to me and discuss them individually.
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"All that we can do is just survive.
All that we can do to help ourselves is stay alive."
Last semester for one of my classes I read two autobiographies by Holocaust survivors, which gives me some background in my thoughts on this song. What they had to go through was beyond anything we could imagine. These lyrics show that desperation they must have felt, that struggle just to make it through another day - another minute! If you think about it, essentially everything was stripped away from them - life was about all they had left.
"Ragged lines of ragged grey,
Skeletons they shuffle away."
The "skeletons" line really got to me because I think it could be seen in two ways. The first is heightened by the picture shown at this point on the video: there were skeletons of dead bodies that the guards or whoever had to "shuffle away." Here, the "they" refers to those who took care of the bodies. The second case is much more poetic, even as it is horribly tragic. The people in those camps were skeletons - moving groups of bones seemingly without purpose and without identity. Here, the "they" refers to the "living" victims.
"Sickness to insanity,
Prayer to profanity."
I think this part is really sad, because it shows how much the people in the camps were affected emotionally and spiritually by what happened to them. Some of them started out sick and went insane. Some of them started out (at least supposedly) with faith in God, but lost it along the way. This happened in one of the autobiographies I read, Night (by Elie Wiesel). He was a devout Jew at the beginning, but that all changed during the Holocaust. I think this is one of the most tragic parts of the Holocaust, and I'm thankful it didn't happen to everyone (for example, the girl in the other Holocaust book I read).
"Are we the last ones left alive?
Are we the only human beings to survive?"
This emphasizes just how cut off from everything the people in the camps were. They didn't know what was going on beyond their own little world. They didn't know if their family members were still alive, they didn't know how the war was progressing. Sometimes, if I remember right from one of the books I read, they could figure things out, but from what I recall they were generally pretty isolated from the outside world.
Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anti-war_songs#World_War_II
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rkiqxc9p_jE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WSJZ4wsM50
Night, by Elie Wiesel
I Have Lived a Thousand Years, by Livia Bitton-Jackson
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