Polish Tango: Wiera Gran - Fernando (1939)

Описание: Wiera Gran & Ork. Odeon pod dyr. Jerzego Gerta (Odeon Orchester dir. by Jerzy Gert) – Fernando [Fernando / You Can’t Force a Girl To Always Love You] Tango (Frank, Gert – Drabik) Odeon, 1939 (Polish)

NOTE: This tango is one of the last pre-war Polish hits recorded on the Polish branch of the Odeon label. In September 1939, the distinguished history of the Warsaw-based Odeon label was cut short, and in a few months Wiera Gran - whose star as one of Poland's top pop-singers was rapidly rising - joined hundreds of thousands of Jewish residents in the Nazi ghetto for Polish Jews set up in Warsaw by the German occupiers of Poland during World War II. (Wiera Gran’s Jewish name was Dwojra Grynberg). She survived the Holocaust thanks to her Polish friends who hid Wiera Gran until 1945 in one of the villages by Warsaw.

Accused after the war by her Jewish compatriots of the pro-Nazi “collaboration” – the accusations never confirmed by any trustworthy evidence – made her life in years to come, the hell of accusations and slender within the Jewish circles in Poland and on the emigration in Paris. They went so far as to claim that eyewitnesses had seen her driving around Warsaw in a carriage, accompanied by an SS officer with whom she was supposedly “having an affair”. Anyone who lived through even one day in German-occupied Warsaw, especially on the Jewish side, would know how absurd such accusations were. Wiera Gran was a great star of pre-war entertainment in Poland and her Jewish origin was widely known. Any German officer who showed himself in public with such a "mistress" during the war would immediately be sent to the eastern front or worse. Nevertheless, when she arrived in Israel for her concerts, she was greeted at the train station by militia of her enemies, dressed in the Auschwitz camp striped uniforms.

A great Polish song star, Wiera Gran was thus annihilated. After the war, she recorded a few 78 rpm albums on a Polish label in Paris. In the 1960s she visited Poland and recorded an LP with her old hits in the new arrangements. These records show what excellent vocal conditions she still had, even better than before the war. Unfortunately, she was not allowed to develop.