A Holocaust survivor shares her story as part of an avant-garde jazz performance at Joe’s Pub

Holocaust survivor Millie Baran has seen and done a lot in her 99 years. After being confined to the Oszmiana ghetto in Poland, she was deported as a teen to multiple labor and concentration camps. When the war was over, she spent four years in a displaced persons camp in Germany before moving to New York as a newlywed. Here, she became a mother, a grandmother and, eventually, a great-grandmother, and even shared her story on “The View.”

But on Sunday night, Baran will do something that she never thought she’d do: She will share her story of survival as part of an avant-garde jazz performance at the downtown Manhattan venue Joe’s Pub.

Baran, a Forest Hills resident who loves singing but has no professional music experience, has partnered with Albert Marquès, a composer, pianist and a New York City public school music teacher who originally hails from Barcelona. Marquès’ project, Ampl!fy Voices, uses music to tell the stories of underrepresented voices, including men on death row, a free speech advocate in Spain who went to prison for criticizing the king and, now, Holocaust survivors.

For this iteration of Ampl!fy Voices, titled “Mir Zaynen Do,” (“We Are Here” in Yiddish), Marquès is working with a team of six Ashkenazi Jewish musicians who play piano, guitar, alto sax, bass and drums — plus Baran’s spoken word performance, in which she narrates her own testimony. The group released three music videos on YouTube; two feature mostly Baran’s spoken word over a mournful, almost discordant sound, while in the third, Baran and her two adult daughters sing “Mir Zaynen Do,” one of many titles for the Yiddish partisan song written in the Vilna Ghetto by poet Hirsch Glick in 1943.

Sunday will be the first time that the musical collaboration will be performed live. Baran, who will be in the audience, said she has no idea what to expect, but she’s looking forward to taking in the show — and amplifying her survival story.

“When you read things in the books, in the newspapers, it’s one thing. It’s entirely a different thing when you hear it, like they say, from the horse’s mouth,” Baran said in a Zoom interview. “You hear it when a person went through all those sarot [storms], tsuris, so, as we will say, entirely different than you read it in the paper. So I want, for posterity, maybe somebody will hear it, maybe somebody will see it.”

Born in Oszmiana, Poland (now Belarus), a shtetl near Vilnius, Lithuania, Baran was a teenager when her father and uncles were murdered by Nazis in 1941, along with almost all the other adult Jewish men in the town. Her older sister was killed while they were trapped in the Oszmiana ghetto; eventually, after being shuffled through several concentration camps, she and her mother were liberated by the Soviets from Stutthoff concentration camp near Danzig (now Gdańsk) in the spring of 1945. Baran met her husband Mikhl in Łódź in 1946; he was also from Oszmiana, and had been a Soviet fighter who was among those who liberated the Majdanek concentration camp outside Lublin. The couple lived in Brownsville, Brooklyn for 10 years, had two daughters, Ruth and Janice, and eventually moved to Forest Hills. Mikhl died at their home there in April 2020.

Marquès is not Jewish, but his wife and children are. He first heard Baran’s testimony at a Workers’ Circle Hebrew school event in December 2023, and was struck by the urgency of her testimony — that soon there would be no survivors left to tell the story of the Holocaust from firsthand experience.

As a composer, Marquès was inspired to incorporate Baran’s story into a musical project.

“On the topic of the Holocaust, for example, there is a moment I think that the brain disconnects,” he said. “It’s just too much. You say this word in English that I really like, ‘unspeakable.’ There is a moment that words, it’s not that they’re not enough, but are too much.”

Contemporary music, by contrast, “helps the audience to create empathy with the person, but feeling it not from a political or ideological…  it is a feeling.”

Growing up, Marquès said he didn’t learn anything about what the Spanish did to the Jews of Catalonia, starting with the Spanish Inquisition, through the Holocaust, and all the way up to present-day antisemitism. (In fact, growing up, Marquès said he didn’t even know Sephardic Jews existed.)

“Nobody taught me any of that ever in school or anywhere, while being exposed to the typical antisemitic tropes,” he said. But this new project, as well as an earlier one he recorded, titled “Sefarad” — a tribute to Jewish musical heritage in Spain — tell those untold stories of a people he used to know nothing about.

The music of the “Mir Zaynen Do” project isn’t cheerful — but it doesn’t have the weight of the typical minor-key, big orchestra works with klezmer elements that are typical to the Holocaust music genre.

“This is not a criticism, but I think that this masterpiece by John Williams and the ‘Schindler’s List’ kind of defines so much [of] what people expect from the music of this topic that I had to go far away from that,” Marquès said.

Sunday’s show will feature an “all-star lineup” of local jazz musicians, including Gilad Hekselman, Noa Fort, Roy Nathanson and Ari Hoenig. Marquès will also perform, along with his 10-year-old daughter, Aviva.

The collaboration “it’s not a history class. It’s not a book: It’s Millie,” Marquès said. “You’re listening to her, and you cannot agree or disagree with her. She’s explaining her story. And by doing that, I think I’m removing a lot of other inputs that we have in lots of different directions.”

“Albert Marquès and Ampl!fy Voices: We Are Here (Mir Zaynen Do) featuring Millie Baran” will be performed at Joe’s Pub (425 Lafayette St.) on Sunday, Feb. 2 at 6 p.m. For tickets, $30, and info, click here.