From Warsaw to Lviv & Beyond: Henryk Wars’ Tea-Jazz Orchestra
Following the Nazi German invasion, and the outbreak of World War II, a number of artists, singers and musicians from Warsaw’s top cabarets fled to the eastern city of Lviv – where they formed a new troupe, under the direction of Polish ‘King of Jazz’, Henryk Wars.
Performing and releasing interwar hits – newly translated into Russian – and touring across the Soviet Union, the Tea-Jazz Orchestra became one of the most popular bands of émigré Poles during the war. But its history is also linked to the wider multi-language interwar cultures of Central Europe, and has a legacy which stretches far beyond the early years of the war…
Henryk Wars, photo: Michał Karski Whilst the creation of the Tea-Jazz Orchestra originated in the chaos and destruction of the first few weeks and months of World War II, the company was far from a pop-up, amateur theatre – instead it encompassed the leading lights of Polish interwar cabaret. More than that, though, the troupe served as a vital means by which such artists could ensure their own safety, even if on a temporary basis.
The cabarets of interwar Warsaw had risen to prominence on a wave of popular songs, witty repartee and biting hot-topic political satire, targeting contemporary mores and international affairs. Many of the shows of 1939 – some of the final revues performed before the outbreak of war – took the growing threat posed by Nazi Germany as a central theme, with songs about dictators with moustaches, and parodies of other fascist European leaders. This provoked interventions from disgruntled staff at the German embassy – eventually leading to changes in the programme. But other art forms also embraced the trend: the burgeoning Polish film industry planned features about German spies, whilst caricatures of Hitler were also published in Polish newspapers. In many cases, the most prominent stars of the age – people like Eugeniusz Bodo and Ludwik Sempoliński – were those who had performed in these routines.
Yet, once war broke out, these artists found themselves at risk of reprisals. There were rumours that actors who had played in anti-fascist plays in other Polish cities had been executed by German forces. Sempoliński had to go into hiding in and around Vilnius. For Bodo, who had a Swiss passport via his father, heading south looked like a better escape route. Ending up first in Rivne and then in Lviv, Bodo joined up with several artists, authors and cultural figures who had fled to the city in the hope of surviving the war.
Other artists faced a perilous journey to even reach Lviv. Gwidon Borucki – the first to perform the legendary song Red Poppies on Monte Cassino – left Warsaw with Włodzimierz Boruński as well as Wilhelm Schulz, Bruno Schulz’s nephew, eventually crossing the border into the Soviet Union in disguise, under a cart filled with straw.
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One of the successes of theatrical and musical interwar Lwów (today’s L’viv) was Ukrainian tango. Bohdan Veselovs’kyi, a young conservatory student, wrote a Poland-wide hit, ‘Pryide shche chas’, The Time Will Come Again, performed with several young friends and colleagues […] all of whom made up the “Yabtso” jazz orchestra. Veselovs’kyi’s hit played on the radio throughout interwar Poland, and so it must have resonated with more than a Ukrainian-speaking audience […] Veselovs’kyi himself left in 1938, leaving the city bereft of modern urban Ukrainian culture. There was no such culture in Ukrainian for the Soviets to co-opt on their arrival, and they had nothing to bring to Eastern Poland except historical melodramas and folk orchestras. The Party-state had to turn to refugees from Nazi-occupied Warsaw to craft Soviet entertainment for the new territories. Soviet L’viv became a refuge for stars of the world of Polish cabaret, cinema, and popular song.
Konrad Tom, circa 1919, photo: archival material One of the organisations established to provide entertainment was a Polish-language Teatr Miniatiur (Theatre of Small Forms), established in December 1939. As Fowler notes, the theatre, ‘performed in a former movie theatre, the Marusenka, on Akademicka Street, located off Smolka Square in an area well known in the interwar period for Yiddish cabarets’. At the helm was Polish writer and emcee Konrad Tom, who later led the theatre on tour across major cities in the USSR. It was the most successful theatre in Lviv between 1939-41.
One of its 1940 shows, a propaganda-comedy called Muzyka na Ulicy (Music in the Street) told the story of two unemployed American musicians who had been welcomed in Lviv, despite the rumblings of war around them. ‘The film’s plot and the reality of Lviv did not exactly match,’ notes Hnatiuk.
But another source of entertainment came from a theatrical jazz division of the Lviv Philharmonic: a tea-jazz orchestra, headed by Henryk Wars.
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‘Tea-jazz’ was a term coined by Leonid Utesov (aka Weisbein) from Odessa to refer to his theatricalised jazz performances. Run by famous Warsaw composer Henryk Wars, the Polish-Jewish Irving Berlin who had written Tylko we Lwowie, the group was joined by stars from the Warsaw cabarets Qui Pro Quo and Morskie Oko. […] Bodo and Wars […] were frequent collaborators; Bodo and Wars’s pre-war hit, Umówiłem Się z Nią na Dziewiątą [I Have a Date with Her at Nine] was so well-known that it became a joke among literati in newly Soviet Lviv flummoxed by the new two-hour time shift from Polish time to Moscow time: did that mean ‘meeting with her’ at nine o’clock by the old time, or at nine o’clock by the new time? The lyric from a pre-war hit song became absorbed by the local city culture, shaped by the new Soviet realities.
All japes aside, though, the tea-jazz orchestra served a more serious function: ensuring the safety of the artists involved. Quoted in an article by Michał Procner, Wars said that the orchestra:
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was not only of simple, artistic significance. It was a way to save lives, and avoid concentration camps, transports of people to camps in Siberia or anywhere, and even death.
From Ukrainian-born jazz starlet, to doyenne of London Polonia
Whilst the tea-jazz orchestra was mainly composed of the artists, musicians and singers of interwar Polish stage and screen, one of the leading performers had been previously associated with Bohdan Veselovsky’s ‘Yabtso Jazz’ group: Ukrainian-born Iryna Renata Jarosiewicz.
Iryna Yarosevych & Bohdan Vesolovsky, photo: public domain She performed with the jazz group in the late 1930s, touring in Lviv and the Carpathians – as well as becoming romantically involved with the aforementioned Ukrainian tango composer, Veselovsky. A photograph from the period depicts the couple embracing – Veselovsky sharply-dressed in a sweater vest and shirt, clasping her shoulders; Jarosiewicz leaning back against his chest, fingers intertwined, in a fit of big-grin giggles.
Their love affair, though was not to last. In 1938, Veselovsky left Lviv for the mountains. Jarosiewicz, meanwhile, stayed in the city and was first associated with the Lviv Opera, before joining Wars’s tea-jazz orchestra. Adopting the stage name Renata Bogdańska – allegedly after Veselovsky’s first name – her hits included a Russian-language version of Na Pierwszy Znak (The First Sign), a 1930s Polish slowfox which had been previously performed by interwar star Hanka Ordonówna. Much later, Jarosiewicz would perform for Polish Parade, the travelling theatre troupe of the Anders army – and go on to marry General Anders, becoming Irena Anders, the doyenne of London Polonia.
Seven-rouble records
Jarosiewicz’s story was not a unique one, and in fact speaks for the history of the tea-jazz orchestra as a whole. Powered by artists of multiple nationalities and backgrounds, brought together through disruption, war and exile; yet built on the popular song of a more carefree 1920s and 1930s – recast and percolated through translation and lyric changes – the orchestra was a small, musical snapshot of the fast-moving social and political changes in the region. However, it was not only a transient art form: in the early 1940s, the orchestra also released several shellac records of its leading numbers. As Romuald Mieczkowski notes, these records, priced at seven roubles, included Russian versions of pre-war Polish songs such as Zapomnienie (Oblivion) and Nic o Tobie Nie Wiem (I Hardly Know Anything about You). Many of the songs plucked from pre-war repertoires were translated by Feliks Konarski, who had been born in Kyiv.
One of the most popular, though, was a Russian version of the song Tylko we Lwowie (Only in Lviv), first performed by radio ragamuffins Kazimierz Wajda and Henryk Vogelfanger, or Szczepko and Tońko, in their 1939 film Włóczęgi (The Vagabonds). In the Russian version, produced only a year later, the lyrics (written by Pavel Grigoriev) not only touted the pleasures of Lviv in comparison to global cities, but contained a plea to other wartime refugees and displaced people: Ждем вас во Львове! (Lviv awaits you!). Also known as the ‘Farewell song of Lviv Jazz’, and performed as the finale of every show, this number was released on a record under the Soviet Gramplastrest recording company, with an intricately-designed label. The song name loops around the top of the scene; to the left, a swathe of curtain peels back to reveal a band of musicians, instruments poised, as a conductor gestures towards them. On the B-side, a Russian song, ‘My Hero’, is illustrated with a bolting aeroplane; the song’s title a jet trail in the sky.
The artists of the orchestra were also conscripted to write music for other Soviet enterprises. Henryk Wars composed music for the 1941 Soviet propaganda film Мечта (Dream), directed by Mikhail Romm, which was intended to justify the seizure of eastern Poland.
The sale of the numbers by the band is testament to their popularity – and the approval of their work by Soviet authorities. Both Bodo and Wars, Hnatiuk notes, were ‘handsomely compensated’ for their music.
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Artur Gold & Jerzy Petersburski band, circa 1930, photo: Wikimedia Commons
Interestingly, even before the tea-jazz orchestra, Russian translations of pre-war Polish songs had seen profound success – and particularly those by another Polish interwar composer, and the titan of Polish tango, Jerzy Petersburski. Though Mieczkowski writes that some of his compositions, including the internationally-popular Tango Milonga, as well as Już Nigdy (Never Again), were little admired, the brooding tango To Ostatnia Niedziela was a breakout hit, performed under the title Utomliennoye Solntse (Weary Sun). During the war, Petersburski continued composing in Soviet Russia for ‘Blue Jazz’, a State Jazz Orchestra of the Belorussian Soviet Republic. His waltz Sinii Platochek (The Blue Handkerchief) was performed by a variety of Russian artists, its lyrics altered to become a war song.
Mieczkowski notes an urban legend among the Polish intelligentsia in Vilnius, that the Soviets invited Petersburski to live permanently in the Soviet Union if he fulfilled one condition: to rename his surname from Petersburski to Leningradski.
Tours across the Soviet Union
Whilst the tea-jazz orchestra began in Lviv, it soon embarked on tours across the Soviet Union, from Odessa to Moscow, and beyond. Hnatiuk notes that the first tour to Odessa occurred in 1940, just as mass deportations of Poles began in Lviv:
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It is hard to establish today whether the fortuitous timing was entirely coincidental, or whether some friendly Soviet colleagues tipped them off. What we do know is that singers from the Theater of the Opera, and actors from all three dramatic theaters and from the satirical Teatr Miniatiur, appear on the list of the 644 bezhentsy (refugees) whom the local Soviet theater administration ‘reclaimed’ from the NKVD, thus saving them from deportation […] in contrast, the names of our jazz orchestra members, except for Henryk Wars, do not appear on this list.
Whilst the conditions of the Odessa tour – and others across the Soviet Union – were poor, and songs and material heavily censored, the band attracted audiences wherever they travelled:
The Russian audience welcomed us enthusiastically. These were the only bright moments in their gray gloomy life under a Stalinist regime that did not spare its citizens either.
Gwidon Borucki, trans. JB
Polish actor and heartthrob Eugeniusz Bodo served as an emcee during the band’s tours across the Soviet Union. A photograph from the 1940 tour to Odessa, of the group assembled on the Potemkin steps, features him in the second row, beaming at the camera. It was to be one of his last photographs.
The orchestra fragments
In spring 1941, Bodo decided to leave the troupe – upending the orchestra’s regular numbers:
The eloquent performer was not easy to replace. It was even harder to adjust the band’s repertoire – so much that once Bodo quit, a female singer took over his hit Umówiłem Się z Nią na Dziewiątą.
But the decision was to prove a fatal one for Bodo himself. He had left the orchestra in an attempt to flee to America on his Swiss passport. But instead of escaping, he suddenly disappeared.
It was not until the 1990s that Bodo’s fate was revealed in Red Cross documents. His passport had aroused the NKVD’s suspicions, and they arrested him on trumped-up charges of espionage, eventually sentencing him to hard labour in a gulag.
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Eugeniusz Bodo after his arrest by the NKVD, 1941, photo: public domain
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Ambassador Stanisław Kot personally sought Bodo’s release, and the first secretary of the Polish embassy Aleksander Mniszek wrote letters to the prisoner and the authorities. All in vain. Such diplomatic intervention only affirmed the NKVD functionaries’ certainty that Bodo was an active spy. Absurdly, Bodo’s leading role as an agent in the unfinished film Uwaga – Szpieg! (Caution, Spy!) presented an additional incriminating factor. According to the investigators, he must have known the secrets of the profession inside and out, because a mere actor could never successfully play a spy.
Bodo perished in 1943, on his way to Kotlas.
The rest of the band embarked on further tours across the Soviet Union through 1941. It was when they were in Sverdlovsk, in the Urals, in June 1941 that news broke of the German invasion. A return to Lviv seemed impossible – and so the band headed further east, performing in Crimea and Asia, before joining up with Henryk Wars’s theatre. Escaping near-starvation and appalling conditions, the band ultimately enrolled in the Anders Army, and began performing as Polish Parade across the Middle East, and then into Italy.
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Still from 'Wielka Droga', directed by Michał Waszyński, 1946, photo: F. Maliniak / collection of Anna Maria Anders / Filmoteka Narodowa – Instytut Audiowizualny / fototeka.fn.org.pl
A feature film based on the journey of the Anders Army through Siberia, Palestine and Italy, Wielka Droga (The Great Journey) was produced in 1946. Directed by pre-war film producer Michał Waszyński, with a plot by Konrad Tom, music by Henryk Wars, and featuring Irena Anders and Adam Aston, the film was an encore not only to the rich musical and theatrical culture of interwar Poland, but to its continuation on the road during the war, first with the tea-jazz orchestra, and then with Polish Parade – despite the trauma and terror faced by the artists involved.
