Description
HELL HOLE
CATEGORY
History • Holocaust • World War II • Nazi Persecution • Human Survival
PRIMARY EMOTION
Horror
ALSO FITS
Fear • Helplessness • Grief • Human Cruelty • Survival • Remembrance • Loss • Compassion
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
HELL HOLE is about the Holocaust and the human beings trapped inside the Nazi system of persecution and mass murder during Adolf Hitler’s rule and World War II.
More specifically, when I use the words “hell hole,” I am thinking about the Nazi camps and especially the gas chambers and killing centers where human beings were systematically murdered.
That changes how the entire song should be heard.
When I write about smoke, ashes, skeletons, people unable to run and families being destroyed, those images are not there simply to create a frightening war song. They belong to the history I am trying to confront.
The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators. Nazi persecution and mass murder also took the lives of millions of other victims. The Nazi camp system included concentration camps, forced-labor camps, transit camps and killing centers. Five killing centers were established in German-occupied Poland specifically for the mass murder of Jews, with poisonous gas as the primary means of killing at those centers.
That history is the foundation underneath HELL HOLE.
I am not trying to recreate the experience of somebody who survived those places. I wasn’t there, and I would never pretend that I was.
What I am doing is looking at that history and trying to imagine the terror of being a human being caught inside something so deliberately designed to remove your freedom, your dignity, your family and ultimately your life.
That is my hell hole.
THE STORY BEHIND THE SONG
There is an important distinction I want to make before going any further.
HELL HOLE is not simply about Germany fighting a war.
It is about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
That distinction matters because the Holocaust cannot be reduced to ordinary battlefield casualties. The Nazis created an enormous system of persecution, imprisonment, deportation, forced labour and mass murder. Auschwitz-Birkenau became the largest Nazi camp complex and was both a concentration and forced-labor camp system and a killing center.
The gas chambers are particularly important to understanding what I was seeing in my mind when I wrote this song.
At Auschwitz, gas chambers were used for mass murder, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex eventually contained large gas chambers and crematoria. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial documents how men, women and children selected for death were taken to those chambers.
Once you know that, some of my lyrics become much clearer.
“Dark as coal, leaving us with no soul”
“No good comes from skeletons in the cold”
“The burst of smoke, charcoal—our ashes become compost”
Those are not random dark images.
The smoke and ashes have a historical connection to what happened to murdered victims whose bodies were burned in crematoria. When Allied forces liberated Nazi camps, they encountered survivors in horrific conditions as well as bodies, bones and human ashes.
I wanted the song to force me to look at that.
Not comfortably.
Not from a distance.
I wanted to put myself as close as imagination responsibly allows to the human beings who were trapped inside that nightmare.
WHY I WROTE THIS SONG
I wrote HELL HOLE because there are parts of history that should never become just another chapter somebody memorizes for a test and then forgets.
The Holocaust is one of them.
Once you strip away the dates, military movements and political language, you are left with people.
Mothers.
Fathers.
Children.
Grandparents.
Brothers.
Sisters.
Friends.
Lovers.
Human beings who had names, homes, occupations, personalities, memories, arguments, jokes, plans and futures.
Then somebody decided they were worth less.
That is one of the most frightening things human beings can do to one another.
The machinery came later.
The hatred and dehumanization had to come first.
That is part of what makes this history so important to me. Before people can be treated as if their lives do not matter, somebody has to convince themselves—or convince others—that those people somehow matter less.
HELL HOLE rejects that completely.
WHY THIS MATTERS TO ME
There is a line in this song that says:
“Let me go, we were never part of the plan”
Knowing what this song is actually about gives that line a different weight.
I imagine somebody wanting nothing more complicated than the freedom to walk away.
To go home.
To find their family.
To live.
But millions of people imprisoned under the Nazi system were denied choices that most of us take for granted. Jewish people were forced from their homes, deported, imprisoned and transported to killing centers as part of the Nazi plan to systematically murder Europe’s Jews.
That is why another line matters so much:
“Let’s bring out the lives that still can be saved”
That is probably the closest HELL HOLE comes to reaching for hope.
Get them out.
Open the gates.
Save whoever is still alive.
History tells us that Allied forces eventually did reach and liberate Nazi camps in 1944 and 1945. What those soldiers encountered helped expose the enormous scale of the crimes that had taken place.
But liberation also came too late for millions.
That is the part that cannot be changed.
It can only be remembered.
WHY THIS SONG FITS MOITA
HELL HOLE belongs in MOITA because this is exactly where I believe music and education can meet.
A song can make somebody feel something.
Then the webpage can ask them to go further.
What was the Holocaust?
How did Hitler and the Nazi regime gain the power to persecute entire groups of people?
How does propaganda turn neighbours against neighbours?
How does dehumanization begin?
What were concentration camps?
What were killing centers?
Why were gas chambers created?
Who were the victims?
Who resisted?
Who survived?
Who helped?
Who remained silent?
How was this allowed to happen?
Those questions are bigger than this song.
They should be.
HELL HOLE can open the door, but history has to provide the answers.
That is why the Documentary & Learning Centre for this song will matter. When we reach that part of the webpage, I want the history to come from Holocaust museums, memorial institutions, archives and other reliable sources. I don’t want mythology. I don’t want exaggeration. The documented truth is horrifying enough.
And I want something else to happen.
I want names and human beings to remain more important than numbers.
Because the moment victims become nothing but statistics, we risk losing part of what
remembrance is supposed to protect.
READ THIS FIRST
HELL HOLE deals directly with the Holocaust, Nazi persecution, concentration and extermination camps, gas chambers, crematoria and mass murder.
Some of the lyrics are deliberately disturbing.
They include skeletons, blood, smoke, ashes and people facing death.
Those images are not intended as entertainment.
They are not there to glorify Hitler, Nazi Germany or war.
They are there because I am writing about one of the darkest chapters in human history, and pretending that history was cleaner than it really was would accomplish nothing.
At the same time, I want to be careful about something.
This song is my interpretation and my reaction to history.
It is not survivor testimony.
The voices of Holocaust survivors belong to the survivors themselves.
Their experiences should never be replaced by my imagination or anybody else’s.
HELL HOLE is my attempt to look toward those human beings and ask myself what happens when hatred, power and dehumanization are allowed to travel all the way to their worst possible destination.
That is what the title means.
HELL HOLE.
Not because I needed a frightening title.
Because when I think about human beings being transported into a system where some were sent into sealed chambers and murdered with poisonous gas, I cannot think of many words that describe it better.
FULL LYRICS
HELL HOLE
East, west firing into the middle of the night
Losing all the lives from the left to the right
Running from the fight in fear of falling shells
Begging the world to hear our endless yells
Let me out of this never-ending battle
Let me go, we were never part of the plan
Let’s bring out the lives that still can be saved
From our hearts and souls, not fortune or goals
In cries and in scars
No matter where we are
The weight of it all could make this hell hole fall
In holes or in hearts, no ending—just the start
The silence of the darts, the flesh of the hearts
Ripping our souls, making us run toward the hell hole
Dark as coal, leaving us with no soul
No good comes from skeletons in the cold
The burst of smoke, charcoal—our ashes become compost
Taking our lives by force, ripping souls to lifeless source
The weight of it all could make this hell hole fall
The unholy beast thrives on the pain of spitting blood
I feel the worth of angels trapped, unable to run
The lives of families, lovers, and friends
They’ll destroy every man, woman, and child—
In this hell hole, our lives end
East, west firing into the middle of the night
Losing all the lives from the left to the right
Running from the fight in fear of falling shells
Begging the world to hear our endless yells
Let me out of this never-ending battle
Let me go, we were never part of the plan
Let’s bring out the lives that still can be saved
From our hearts and souls, not fortune or goals
In cries and in scars
No matter where we are
The weight of it all could make this hell hole fall
In holes or in hearts, no ending—just the start
The silence of the darts, the flesh of the hearts
Ripping our souls, making us run toward the hell hole
Dark as coal, leaving us with no soul
No good comes from skeletons in the cold
The burst of smoke, charcoal—our ashes become compost
Taking our lives by force, ripping souls to lifeless source
The weight of it all could make this hell hole fall
SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 1
“East, west firing into the middle of the night
Losing all the lives from the left to the right
Running from the fight in fear of falling shells
Begging the world to hear our endless yells”
This is where HELL HOLE begins, outside the gas chambers and outside the camps, with the war surrounding everything.
I wanted movement immediately.
East.
West.
Left.
Right.
There isn’t a comfortable direction in those opening lines. The Second World War has created a world where ordinary people can find themselves surrounded by violence they did not ask for and cannot control.
But the most important movement in these first four lines is not the firing.
It is the people running.
“Running from the fight in fear of falling shells”
They aren’t charging toward some glorious victory. They’re trying to stay alive.
That distinction matters because HELL HOLE isn’t written from the position of somebody celebrating war. I am walking toward the people underneath it.
Then comes:
“Begging the world to hear our endless yells”
Now the song becomes a plea.
Somebody has to hear us.
Somebody has to know what is happening.
Somebody has to care.
When I connect that line to the Holocaust, it opens a much larger historical question about what the outside world knew as Nazi persecution developed into systematic mass murder, when information became available, and what governments and individuals did with that information.
I don’t need to solve that entire question here.
The lyric isn’t a history exam.
It is a yell.
And I wanted the reader to hear it before we move any deeper into the hell hole.
“Let me out of this never-ending battle
Let me go, we were never part of the plan”
These two lines bring everything down from countries and armies to a single human voice.
Let me out.
Let me go.
There is something almost painfully simple about that.
The victims of the Holocaust did not choose to become targets of Nazi racial ideology. Jewish families did not volunteer to have their rights stripped away, their homes taken, their families separated, their communities destroyed or their lives placed in somebody else’s hands.
That is what I mean by:
“We were never part of the plan”
There was a plan.
But the people being destroyed by it did not create it.
That distinction becomes even more important as the song moves toward the camps and the killing centers.
“Let’s bring out the lives that still can be saved”
I don’t want to rush past this line because it is one of the few places in HELL HOLE where hope manages to push its way through.
Look at what I wrote.
I didn’t say save everybody.
I said:
“the lives that still can be saved”
There is already an understanding inside those words that some people are gone.
But somebody is still alive.
Get them out.
That is the instinct behind the line.
When I think about the liberation of the camps near the end of the war, that lyric becomes even stronger for me. Allied forces encountered prisoners who were starving, sick and physically devastated. At Auschwitz, Soviet troops found thousands of prisoners still alive when they liberated the camp on January 27, 1945.
Those people could still be saved.
So this little line inside a very dark song becomes almost a hand reaching into the darkness.
Who is still there?
Who is breathing?
Who can we bring out?
“From our hearts and souls, not fortune or goals”
Now I deliberately put human beings against ambition.
Fortune.
Goals.
What somebody wants.
What somebody believes they deserve.
What somebody wants to control.
None of that should become more valuable than a human life.
The Holocaust shows what can happen when an ideology decides that some human beings are not merely opponents but people whose existence itself is considered a problem.
That is beyond disagreement.
That is beyond ordinary politics.
Once a government decides an entire people can be systematically removed and murdered, humanity has been pushed somewhere terrifying.
That is why I bring the heart and soul into the lyric.
I am pulling the listener back toward the person.
“In cries and in scars
No matter where we are
The weight of it all could make this hell hole fall”
Here is the first appearance of the title inside the song.
HELL HOLE.
At the beginning, the listener might reasonably think I am simply describing war as hell.
But we’re beginning to discover that I mean something more specific.
We are moving toward the camps.
Toward imprisonment.
Toward the killing centers.
Toward the gas chambers.
The “weight of it all” is beginning to accumulate.
The cries.
The scars.
The people who disappeared.
The families separated.
The people deported.
The people murdered.
And I write:
“could make this hell hole fall”
There is anger in that line, but there is also a wish.
Bring it down.
Destroy the machinery.
Open the gates.
End it.
Then the song takes another step.
“In holes or in hearts, no ending—just the start”
I like the way this line moves between something physical and something we carry inside ourselves.
A hole can be something in the earth.
A hole can also be what is left when somebody you love is gone.
That second kind can last a lifetime.
This is where the Holocaust cannot be understood simply by saying Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945 and therefore the story ended.
The killing ended.
The camps were liberated.
The Nazi regime fell.
But imagine surviving and discovering that your parents were gone.
Your children were gone.
Your husband or wife was gone.
Your brothers and sisters were gone.
Your neighbourhood was gone.
Maybe almost everybody you knew was gone.
Where exactly does the ending happen?
That is why I wrote:
“no ending—just the start”
For somebody who survives, freedom can be the beginning of another journey entirely.
Learning how to live after everything that happened.
“The silence of the darts, the flesh of the hearts”
This line is more abstract.
I don’t want to pretend every lyric I write was designed as some complicated historical code.
Sometimes words are there because of what they make me see and feel.
Here I wanted something sharp and almost unnatural.
Silence.
Darts.
Flesh.
Hearts.
The language starts feeling uncomfortable because we’re entering an uncomfortable place.
But “flesh” and “hearts” keep something important alive.
These are bodies.
These are people.
The Holocaust becomes dangerous to understand only through numbers because numbers don’t bleed.
People do.
“Ripping our souls, making us run toward the hell hole”
This is where the direction of the journey becomes frightening.
Earlier, people were running away from falling shells.
Now they are being driven toward the hell hole.
That is much closer to the history behind the song.
People were deported from their homes and communities throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. Trains carried victims toward ghettos, concentration camps and killing centers.
Imagine that contradiction.
Every instinct tells you to escape.
But the machinery around you controls where you are going.
You can be moving and still have no freedom.
You can be travelling and still be a prisoner.
And you can be running for your life while being pushed toward the very place where somebody intends to take it.
That is where I want to stop for this part of the journey.
Because the next lyric takes us across another line.
We have been approaching the hell hole.
Now we are about to look inside it.
SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 2
“Dark as coal, leaving us with no soul”
Now we’re inside the darkness.
Coal gives me the colour immediately.
Black.
But this isn’t darkness just for the sake of creating a frightening picture. By this point in HELL HOLE, we have travelled from the war outside, through people running, through the plea to be heard, through deportation and toward the place I had in my mind from the beginning.
The camps.
The gas chambers.
The crematoria.
And something else happens in this line.
“leaving us with no soul”
I don’t mean the victims somehow lost their human worth.
Quite the opposite.
Throughout this song I keep trying to hold onto their humanity while describing a system designed to strip it away.
A government can take your property.
It can imprison you.
It can put a number on you.
It can separate you from your family.
It can try to reduce you to something less than a person.
But that doesn’t mean you became less human.
The failure belongs to the people doing it.
“No good comes from skeletons in the cold”
There isn’t much I need to decorate here.
The lyric is already doing the work.
A skeleton in the cold isn’t victory.
It isn’t progress.
It isn’t an achievement.
It is somebody who should have been alive.
When Allied soldiers liberated Nazi concentration camps near the end of the war, they encountered survivors suffering from starvation and disease as well as evidence of enormous numbers of deaths.
There are photographs from the liberation of the camps that are difficult to look at.
I think they should be difficult to look at.
If images of human beings reduced to that condition ever become comfortable, something is wrong.
But I also have to be careful here.
Those photographs show victims at one of the worst moments imaginable.
That isn’t the entirety of who those people were.
Before the camp, somebody in that photograph may have been a teacher.
A carpenter.
A mother.
A musician.
A shopkeeper.
A student.
A child.
A person somebody loved.
That is the person I don’t want the skeleton to erase.
Then comes one of the most important lines in the entire song.
“The burst of smoke, charcoal—our ashes become compost”
This is one of the landmarks.
I want to stay here.
Because if you understand what HELL HOLE is really about, you understand why I wrote smoke, charcoal and ashes.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau and other Nazi killing centers, people were murdered in gas chambers and their bodies were burned. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, crematoria became part of the machinery created to dispose of the bodies of people murdered there.
That is the history underneath this lyric.
But there is a danger in talking about crematoria and gas chambers only as machinery.
You can start describing buildings.
Capacity.
Construction.
Processes.
Numbers.
And suddenly the human being disappears again.
I don’t want that.
So when I write:
“our ashes become compost”
I want you to go backward with me.
Before the ashes, there was a body.
Before the body, there was a living person.
Before that person entered this hell hole, there was a life.
Maybe there was a kitchen table.
Maybe somebody had a favourite song.
Maybe somebody was in love.
Maybe there was a child who hated vegetables.
Maybe somebody had an argument that morning.
Maybe somebody had plans for next year.
We don’t know every individual story.
That is exactly the point.
There were millions of them.
When we say ashes, we are describing what remained after somebody destroyed the person.
We are not describing what that person was.
I think that difference matters.
Because the Nazi system worked through dehumanization.
People were categorized.
Separated.
Reduced.
Processed.
Transported.
Imprisoned.
Murdered.
If I write about the victims only as bodies and ashes, I can accidentally repeat the same reduction in another form.
I refuse to do that.
The ashes were people.
That is the sentence I want sitting beside this lyric.
The ashes were people.
“Taking our lives by force, ripping souls to lifeless source”
Now the word that matters most to me is:
“force”
Nobody volunteered for this.
Nobody chose deportation.
Nobody chose the cattle cars.
Nobody chose the selection process.
Nobody chose the gas chamber.
The victims were trapped inside a system of power that controlled where they could live, where they could travel, whether they could work, whether they could keep their property, whether they could remain with their families and eventually whether they were permitted to remain alive.
“Taking our lives by force”
There is nothing complicated about that statement.
Something was being stolen that could never be returned.
A life.
“ripping souls to lifeless source”
Again I move from the body toward the soul.
I do that throughout HELL HOLE because physical destruction isn’t the only thing I am trying to communicate.
There is something horrifying about one group of human beings deciding another group can be processed toward death.
That requires more than weapons.
It requires a collapse in how another person is seen.
The victim has to become a category before somebody can convince themselves that destroying them is acceptable.
That is why the language of dehumanization matters so much when we study the Holocaust.
Hatred wasn’t merely sitting privately inside somebody’s head.
It was taught.
Published.
Repeated.
Turned into propaganda.
Turned into laws.
Turned into government policy.
Turned into persecution.
And eventually turned into systematic mass murder.
“The weight of it all could make this hell hole fall”
Now the line returns.
But we are not hearing it from the same place anymore.
The first time I said it, we were approaching the hell hole.
Now we have seen what is inside.
Skeletons.
Smoke.
Charcoal.
Ashes.
Lives taken by force.
So when I say:
“could make this hell hole fall”
I want it to fall even harder.
Destroy it.
Stop it.
Get whoever is still alive out of there.
Don’t allow another train to arrive.
Don’t allow another family through those doors.
Don’t allow another person to become smoke.
The words are the same.
The journey has changed them.
Then HELL HOLE moves into another part of the darkness.
“The unholy beast thrives on the pain of spitting blood”
This is where somebody could easily think I am describing Hitler alone.
I’m not.
Hitler is obviously central to the history. There is no reason to soften that. His leadership, ideology and regime were fundamental to the Holocaust.
But the “unholy beast” is larger than one man’s face.
For me, it is the machinery of hatred itself.
It is what happens when prejudice gains organization.
When propaganda feeds it.
When government gives it authority.
When institutions carry it out.
When ordinary people participate.
When others look away.
When human suffering stops being a reason to stop and becomes part of the objective.
That is the beast.
And I deliberately write that it:
“thrives on the pain”
Not merely causes pain.
Thrives on it.
There is something particularly disturbing about cruelty when another person’s suffering becomes evidence that the system is working exactly as intended.
That is why I don’t want to turn the Holocaust into a story about one madman.
One man did not build every camp.
One man did not drive every train.
One man did not guard every prisoner.
One man did not write every order.
One man did not carry out every deportation.
One man did not murder six million Jewish people by himself.
The Holocaust required a system.
It required perpetrators.
It required administrators.
It required institutions.
It required collaborators.
It required people willing to carry out different pieces of the machinery.
And that makes the history more frightening, not less.
Because now we have to look beyond the monster at the top.
We have to look at human behaviour underneath him.
“I feel the worth of angels trapped, unable to run”
After the beast, I deliberately move toward angels.
Not because I am trying to turn every victim into some perfect human being.
They didn’t have to be perfect.
They were human.
That was enough.
The word I care about most here is:
“worth”
Their worth did not disappear because somebody hated them.
Their worth did not disappear because a law discriminated against them.
Their worth did not disappear when somebody forced them onto a train.
Their worth did not disappear behind barbed wire.
Their worth did not disappear inside a gas chamber.
Their worth did not disappear when their bodies became ashes.
That human worth existed all the way through.
“trapped, unable to run”
And there is the helplessness again.
Earlier in the song people were running.
Now there is nowhere left to run.
That is a terrible progression.
At the beginning, movement still seemed possible.
Run from the shells.
Get away.
Call for help.
Now the trap has closed.
And the next lyric makes the loss even more personal.
“The lives of families, lovers, and friends”
This is where I want to stop this part.
Because we have spent a long time looking at systems.
War.
Nazism.
Deportation.
Camps.
Gas chambers.
Crematoria.
Mass murder.
Those are enormous subjects.
But the next line brings everything back to the smallest and most important place.
The people we love.
That is where the journey continues.
SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 3
“The lives of families, lovers, and friends”
This is where the numbers become personal again.
Families.
Lovers.
Friends.
Three ordinary words.
But those three words contain almost everything a human being can lose.
When we study the Holocaust, we have to use numbers because the scale matters. Six million Jewish people were murdered. Millions of other people were persecuted and murdered by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators.
But there is a danger when the number becomes so enormous that we can no longer picture the people inside it.
Six million is difficult to imagine.
One family isn’t.
Most of us know what it means to love somebody.
We know what it means to have a mother, father, brother, sister, husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, child or friend.
We know somebody whose voice we would recognize immediately.
Somebody whose laugh we know.
Somebody who can piss us off and still be somebody we love.
Somebody we expect to be there tomorrow.
That is what I wanted back inside the song.
Because the Holocaust didn’t murder statistics.
It murdered people who belonged to other people.
“The lives of families”
Think about what that means when an entire family is being targeted.
It isn’t only one person disappearing.
A family tree can be cut apart.
Parents lose children.
Children lose parents.
Brothers and sisters are separated.
Grandparents disappear.
Cousins disappear.
People search for one another after liberation and discover there is nobody left to find.
That is a different kind of destruction.
Then:
“lovers”
That word matters too.
History books have to tell us what happened, where it happened and when it happened.
But people living through history don’t stop being human because historians will someday write about them.
People were in love.
People had relationships.
People had plans.
People expected futures together.
The Holocaust destroyed those futures too.
And then:
“friends”
I included friends because sometimes we talk about family as though it is the only relationship that can break your heart.
It isn’t.
A friend can be part of your life for decades.
A friend can know things about you your family doesn’t know.
A friend can become family.
When that person disappears, the hole is real.
That takes me back to the earlier lyric:
“In holes or in hearts”
Now we understand another part of that hole.
It can have somebody’s name.
“They’ll destroy every man, woman, and child—
In this hell hole, our lives end”
This is the bottom of the song.
I don’t think I need to make these words more dramatic.
The history is dramatic enough.
Men.
Women.
Children.
The Nazi genocide of the Jews targeted an entire people. Being a child did not protect somebody from that ideology.
Being innocent didn’t protect them.
Being elderly didn’t protect them.
Being somebody’s mother didn’t protect them.
Being somebody’s little boy or little girl didn’t protect them.
That is one reason the Holocaust is so difficult to understand emotionally.
There is a natural instinct to search for some reason.
What did they do?
Why were they arrested?
Why were they taken?
What crime did the child commit?
There isn’t an answer that makes sense because the child didn’t need to commit a crime.
Their identity was enough for the Nazi system to target them.
That is the horror.
“In this hell hole, our lives end”
This is the first time the title and death come together this directly.
Earlier, I wanted the hell hole to fall.
Now the voice inside the song is telling us what happens if it doesn’t.
Our lives end.
For millions, they did.
There is no clever way around that.
No lyric can rescue them after the fact.
No song can rewrite history.
I can’t create a happier ending simply because a happier ending would be easier to hear.
So I leave the line where it belongs.
At the bottom.
Then something interesting happens.
The song returns to the beginning.
“East, west firing into the middle of the night
Losing all the lives from the left to the right
Running from the fight in fear of falling shells
Begging the world to hear our endless yells”
Same words.
Completely different place.
The first time we heard these lines, we didn’t know everything we were about to see.
Now we do.
We have walked through the darkness.
We have seen the skeletons.
We have followed the smoke.
We have reached the ashes.
We have looked at the machinery.
We have reached families, lovers and friends.
We have reached men, women and children.
So when the song returns to:
“Begging the world to hear our endless yells”
I hear that begging differently.
The first time it introduced the desperation.
The second time it carries everything we have learned since.
That is exactly why I don’t need to explain the entire opening again.
The words haven’t changed.
We have.
“Let me out of this never-ending battle
Let me go, we were never part of the plan”
That line hurts more on the return too.
The first time, “let me go” could still sound like somebody trying to escape a war.
Now we know the hell hole.
So “let me go” becomes much more specific in my mind.
Let me out of the ghetto.
Let me off the train.
Let me out from behind the wire.
Don’t separate me from my family.
Don’t take me toward that chamber.
Let me live.
And then:
“we were never part of the plan”
Now we know more about what that plan became.
A government decided that human beings could be categorized, isolated, deported and murdered.
The victims were forced into somebody else’s ideology.
They didn’t create the hatred.
They were trapped inside its consequences.
“Let’s bring out the lives that still can be saved”
Here comes that little piece of hope again.
And I think it is stronger the second time.
Because now we know exactly what is at stake.
We’ve already reached:
“our lives end”
So when I return to:
“the lives that still can be saved”
there is urgency inside it.
Not tomorrow.
Not after another meeting.
Not after somebody decides whether these lives are politically convenient.
If somebody can still be saved, save them.
That is the human instinct I wanted inside the song.
“From our hearts and souls, not fortune or goals”
Again, the song rejects the idea that ambition should outrank humanity.
By this point I don’t need another long explanation.
The journey has already shown us what happens when human beings become secondary to ideology and power.
The lyric is reminding us what should come first.
People.
“In cries and in scars
No matter where we are
The weight of it all could make this hell hole fall”
The title returns.
But now I hear “fall” differently too.
We know historically that Nazi Germany did fall.
The camps were eventually liberated.
The killing centers stopped operating.
The machinery was defeated.
But that victory comes with a terrible limitation.
You can destroy the hell hole.
You cannot make the people murdered inside it walk back out.
That is something I think about when this line returns.
Victory matters.
Liberation matters.
Stopping the killing matters.
But stopping something after millions are dead doesn’t undo the millions of deaths.
That is why remembrance becomes part of what comes afterward.
The song now enters its final movement.
“In holes or in hearts, no ending—just the start”
We’ve been here before.
I don’t need to rebuild the explanation.
But after everything between the first appearance and this one, the words have gained another meaning.
The Nazi regime can end.
The war can end.
The camps can close.
But the hole remains.
A survivor still has to wake up the next morning.
A person still has to discover who survived.
Someone still has to live with what they saw.
Someone still has to carry the names of people who didn’t come back.
“No ending—just the start”
The ending of one horror can become the beginning of learning how to live after it.
“The silence of the darts, the flesh of the hearts
Ripping our souls, making us run toward the hell hole”
These lines return us through the same passage.
I don’t want to force a second explanation onto them just because they appear again.
Their purpose now is movement.
They carry us back toward the darkest images in the song.
And because we already know what is coming, there is almost a sense of dread in the repetition.
We know where this road goes.
“Dark as coal, leaving us with no soul
No good comes from skeletons in the cold”
Again, darkness.
Again, the bodies.
But I want to hold onto something I said earlier.
Do not let the skeleton become the person’s identity.
The person had a life before somebody reduced their body to that condition.
That matters all the way to the end of this journey.
“The burst of smoke, charcoal—our ashes become compost”
Here is the image again.
Smoke.
Charcoal.
Ashes.
And because this is the final time through the song, I want to return to the sentence that matters most to me.
The ashes were people.
I don’t want anything more complicated than that.
The ashes were people.
“Taking our lives by force, ripping souls to lifeless source”
Again:
“by force”
The victims did not choose this.
And now we reach the closing lyric.
“The weight of it all could make this hell hole fall”
That is where HELL HOLE ends.
Not with Hitler.
Not with an army.
Not with a speech.
Not even with the gas chamber.
It ends with the possibility of the hell hole falling.
I think that matters.
Because although I wrote a song surrounded by death, I didn’t finish by giving the hell hole the final word.
I finished with its fall.
Historically, Nazi Germany was defeated.
The camps were liberated.
The machinery of systematic murder was stopped.
But the people already murdered could not be returned.
So the final line carries two truths at the same time.
The hell hole can fall.
And what happened inside it can never be undone.
That is where remembrance begins.
For me, remembering the Holocaust isn’t about carrying hatred from one generation into another.
It isn’t about blaming people alive today for crimes they didn’t commit.
And it isn’t about turning every modern disagreement into a comparison with Nazi Germany.
It is about looking directly at what human beings were capable of doing to other human beings.
It is about understanding how antisemitism, propaganda, dehumanization, dictatorship, bureaucracy, collaboration and indifference could become part of a machinery that murdered millions.
And then it is about remembering the people.
Families.
Lovers.
Friends.
Men.
Women.
Children.
The people inside those enormous numbers.
The people behind the photographs.
The people whose belongings remain in museums.
The people whose names survive in archives.
The people who survived and spent the rest of their lives carrying what happened.
The people who didn’t survive and never got the chance to tell us themselves.
That is where I want to leave the Lyric Journey.
Back at the final words of the song:
“The weight of it all could make this hell hole fall”
The hell hole fell.
The history remains.
And the people deserve to be remembered.
SECTION TWO
THE STORY
HELL HOLE came from one of the darkest chapters in human history.
When I wrote this song, I wasn’t trying to make Adolf Hitler the main character. Obviously, you cannot tell the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust without Hitler, but I didn’t want to give him the centre of my song.
The people who suffered belong there.
The Jewish families who were persecuted, deported and murdered.
The men, women and children taken from their homes.
The people forced into ghettos.
The people transported in trains.
The people imprisoned in concentration camps.
The people sent to killing centers.
The people murdered in gas chambers.
The people whose bodies were burned.
The people who survived.
And the millions who never came home.
Those are the people I was thinking about when I called this song HELL HOLE.
THE WAR AND THE HOLOCAUST
World War II and the Holocaust are connected, but they are not the same thing.
I think that distinction is important because my song begins with war:
“East, west firing into the middle of the night
Losing all the lives from the left to the right”
Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, beginning World War II in Europe. But Nazi persecution of Jewish people had already begun years earlier after Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933.
Jewish people were progressively excluded from German society and stripped of rights. Antisemitic propaganda portrayed them as enemies. Discriminatory laws isolated them further. Violence and persecution intensified.
As Nazi Germany conquered and occupied large parts of Europe during the war, millions more Jewish people came under Nazi control.
The persecution eventually developed into systematic mass murder.
Six million European Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
Millions of other people were also persecuted by Nazi Germany, including Roma, people with disabilities, Polish and Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, political opponents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men and others targeted by the regime.
That larger history surrounds HELL HOLE.
But the song keeps moving toward one particular horror.
The camps.
The killing centers.
The gas chambers.
HOW DO HUMAN BEINGS GET THERE?
This is one of the questions that bothers me most.
How does a society reach a point where human beings are transported somewhere specifically to be murdered?
It didn’t begin with a gas chamber.
It began earlier.
Hatred.
Antisemitism.
Racial ideology.
Propaganda.
Discrimination.
People being blamed for problems.
Rights being removed.
People being separated from their neighbours.
Property being taken.
People being forced from their homes.
Ghettos.
Deportations.
Then mass murder.
I think there is an important lesson in understanding that progression without turning every modern disagreement into a comparison with Nazi Germany.
Not every prejudice becomes genocide.
Not every political argument is the Holocaust.
The Holocaust is a specific historical event and deserves to be treated that way.
But studying how it developed can teach us something about human behaviour.
Before you can systematically destroy people, it becomes much easier if you first convince others that those people somehow matter less.
That is why dehumanization matters so much in this story.
THE PEOPLE INSIDE THE NUMBERS
Six million.
We need the number because without it we cannot understand the scale.
But I also think the number can become a wall.
Six million is almost impossible for me to picture.
So I try something smaller.
One person.
One family.
One photograph.
One child.
Then I remind myself that the enormous number is made from individual people like that.
Before the Holocaust, these people had lives.
They worked.
They studied.
They played music.
They owned businesses.
They worshipped.
They celebrated birthdays and holidays.
They played sports.
They argued.
They laughed.
They fell in love.
They raised children.
They made plans for futures they expected to have.
That is something I never want to lose while telling this story.
If we remember people only by the way they were murdered, we lose part of who they actually were.
They were alive before somebody made them victims.
THE GHETTOS
Under Nazi occupation, Jewish people in many parts of eastern Europe were forced into ghettos, where they were separated from the surrounding population.
Conditions could be brutal.
Overcrowding, hunger, disease and forced labour killed many people.
But ghettos were not simply places where people waited passively for whatever happened next.
People tried to maintain families.
They taught children.
They practised religion.
They created underground organizations.
They documented what was happening.
They resisted in different ways.
People were still people, even inside conditions deliberately designed to strip away normal life.
Eventually, many ghettos were destroyed and their populations deported to killing centers or murdered elsewhere.
THE TRAINS
The trains are one of the images that stay with me.
Normally a train means you’re going somewhere.
There is a destination.
Maybe somebody is waiting for you when you arrive.
During the Holocaust, railways became part of the machinery of deportation.
Jewish people and other prisoners were transported across Nazi-controlled Europe under terrible conditions.
For enormous numbers of Jewish deportees, the destination was a killing center.
Think about being inside that journey.
You don’t control the door.
You don’t control the direction.
You don’t know exactly where you’re going.
You don’t know what will happen when the doors open.
You may not know whether the person standing beside you will still be beside you an hour later.
That is what I hear underneath my lyric:
“making us run toward the hell hole”
You can be moving and still have no freedom whatsoever.
THE CAMPS AND THE KILLING CENTERS
Another distinction matters here.
Concentration camps and killing centers were not identical.
Nazi Germany established a vast system of concentration camps, forced-labour camps, transit camps and other detention sites.
Prisoners in concentration camps could be subjected to starvation, forced labour, disease, beatings, torture and murder.
Killing centers had another central purpose.
Mass murder.
The major Nazi killing centers were established in German-occupied Poland. Poisonous gas was used as a primary method of murder.
That is where the history moves directly into the darkest image behind my title.
HELL HOLE.
AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU
Auschwitz has become one of the strongest symbols of the Holocaust, although it is important to remember that Auschwitz was not the entire Holocaust.
Auschwitz was a large complex.
It included concentration and forced-labour camps as well as the killing center at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
People were deported there from across Europe.
Jews made up the overwhelming majority of those murdered at Auschwitz. Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and others were also imprisoned and murdered there.
At Birkenau, selections could determine who would temporarily remain alive for forced labour and who would be sent toward immediate death.
Just stop there for a moment.
Another human being deciding whether you get another day.
Whether your child gets another day.
Whether your mother gets another day.
Whether the person beside you gets another day.
That is difficult for me to comprehend.
THE GAS CHAMBERS
This is the part of the history most directly connected to HELL HOLE.
At Nazi killing centers, poisonous gas was used to murder enormous numbers of people.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, gas chambers and crematoria became part of the machinery of mass murder.
The people being sent inside were not soldiers fighting a battle.
They included civilians.
Parents.
Grandparents.
Children.
People who had already lost their homes, possessions, freedom and often members of their families.
Then their lives were taken.
That is why HELL HOLE begins in war but doesn’t remain on a battlefield.
By the time the lyrics reach smoke, charcoal and ashes, I am looking somewhere very different.
I am looking at systematic murder.
THE SMOKE AND THE ASHES
“The burst of smoke, charcoal—our ashes become compost”
That line carries some of the heaviest imagery in the entire song.
Bodies of murdered victims were burned in crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other killing centers. During periods when killing exceeded crematorium capacity at Auschwitz-Birkenau, bodies were also burned in open-air pits.
That is the historical reality behind the smoke and ashes.
But I don’t want to leave the people there.
I said this during the Lyric Journey and it deserves to remain in the story:
The ashes were people.
Before the ashes was a body.
Before the body was a prisoner.
Before the prisoner was somebody’s number.
There was a person.
A person with a name.
That person had existed before Nazi Germany decided what category to put them into.
THE CHILDREN
Children are one of the hardest parts of this history for me.
What threat does a little child represent?
None.
But genocide doesn’t require an individual person to have done something wrong.
The person’s identity becomes enough.
Jewish children were murdered alongside adults.
Children died from starvation, disease and brutal conditions.
Children were murdered during mass shootings.
Children were murdered in killing centers.
Some survived by hiding, escaping, receiving help from rescuers, living under false identities or through other extraordinary circumstances.
But enormous numbers were murdered.
That history sits directly behind:
“They’ll destroy every man, woman, and child”
I don’t need to make that line any more dramatic.
The truth is enough.
RESISTANCE
There is another part of Holocaust history that I don’t want lost.
Victims resisted.
Resistance didn’t always mean holding a weapon.
There was armed resistance, including uprisings in ghettos and camps.
There were escapes.
There were underground organizations.
There were people secretly recording what was happening.
There were people preserving documents.
There were people teaching children.
There were people maintaining religious and cultural traditions.
There were people sharing food when they barely had enough themselves.
There were people helping others survive.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising became one of the best-known examples of armed Jewish resistance, but resistance occurred in many forms and in many places.
I think that matters because victims should never be reduced to people simply waiting for death.
They were human beings trying to survive impossible circumstances.
THE PEOPLE WHO HELPED
There were also people who were not themselves the primary targets of Nazi genocide but chose to help those who were.
Some hid Jewish people.
Some provided false documents.
Some helped people cross borders.
Some brought food.
Some carried information.
Some helped children escape.
Some risked imprisonment or death.
Not everybody helped.
Some remained silent.
Some benefited from persecution.
Some collaborated.
Some participated directly.
That range of behaviour is one reason this history asks such difficult questions.
Under pressure, what does a human being choose to do?
It is easy for me to sit decades later and imagine what I would have done.
The truth is that I wasn’t there.
I don’t know.
I think history deserves that honesty.
What I can do is respect the people who actually made courageous choices when the danger was real.
LIBERATION
The Nazi camp system did not liberate itself.
As Allied armies advanced through Europe in 1944 and 1945, they encountered and liberated camps.
Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.
They found thousands of prisoners still alive.
Other camps were liberated by Soviet, American, British and Canadian forces and their allies as Nazi Germany collapsed.
But liberation wasn’t a clean happy ending.
Soldiers encountered starving and sick prisoners.
They found corpses and evidence of mass murder.
For survivors, an open gate meant freedom.
But freedom could not return the dead.
AFTER THE GATES OPENED
Imagine surviving and then asking:
Where is everybody?
Where is my mother?
Where is my father?
Where are my children?
Where is my husband?
Where is my wife?
Where is my brother?
Where is my sister?
Where do I go now?
Some survivors returned home.
Some searched for relatives.
Some discovered entire families had been murdered.
Some could not or did not want to return to the communities they had lived in before the war.
Many displaced people had to begin again somewhere else.
That is another reason one of my lyrics stays with me:
“In holes or in hearts, no ending—just the start”
The camp can be liberated.
The war can end.
But grief doesn’t obey a military surrender.
WHY I DON’T PUT HITLER IN THE CENTRE
Hitler belongs in this history.
His responsibility cannot be minimized.
But I don’t want him occupying the emotional centre of HELL HOLE.
He already has enough space in history books.
I would rather give that space to somebody whose name almost disappeared.
A mother.
A father.
A child.
A young couple.
A grandfather.
A musician.
A worker.
A student.
A prisoner who resisted.
A survivor who had to begin again.
A person who didn’t survive and therefore never got the opportunity to tell us what happened.
That is where I want the reader looking.
WHY I WROTE HELL HOLE
I didn’t write this because I thought I could explain the Holocaust in a song.
I can’t.
Nobody should expect one song to carry that much history.
I wrote it because music can make somebody stop.
A lyric can make somebody curious.
A title can make somebody ask a question.
Maybe somebody hears:
“The burst of smoke, charcoal—our ashes become compost”
and wants to understand what I was talking about.
Maybe they read this page.
Maybe they look up Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Maybe they listen to survivor testimony.
Maybe they learn the name of somebody who was murdered.
Maybe they discover a story of resistance.
Maybe they begin understanding how antisemitism and dehumanization were turned into government policy and eventually mass murder.
Then the song has opened a door.
That is enough.
THE STORY I WANT LEFT BEHIND
HELL HOLE looks directly into one of the darkest places human beings ever created.
But darkness isn’t the reason I look.
People are.
Real people were there.
They had lives before the Holocaust.
They had people they loved.
They had names.
They had histories.
They had futures they expected to live.
Some survived.
Millions did not.
Nazi Germany was defeated.
The camps were liberated.
The gas chambers stopped killing.
The hell hole eventually fell.
But history doesn’t disappear when the gates open.
The people who were murdered deserve more than becoming a number we memorize.
They deserve to be remembered as people.
That is the story behind HELL HOLE.
SECTION THREE
THE DEEPER MEANING
HELL HOLE is rooted in the Holocaust, but once I step away from the historical events themselves, there are questions underneath the song that stay with me.
How does hatred become normal?
How does somebody convince one human being that another human being matters less?
How does prejudice move from somebody’s mouth into government policy?
Why do some people participate?
Why do some people remain silent?
Why do others resist?
And at what point does somebody finally say this has gone too far?
Those questions are part of the reason this history still matters to me.
THE FIRST STEP IS NOT THE GAS CHAMBER
When people think about the Holocaust, some of the strongest images are understandably the concentration camps, gas chambers, crematoria, barbed wire and prisoners.
But those were not the beginning.
That may be one of the most important things to understand.
The beginning is much less dramatic.
An idea.
A prejudice.
A stereotype.
A lie repeated often enough that somebody begins accepting it.
A group blamed for problems.
People divided into us and them.
Rights removed gradually.
Cruelty becoming easier to justify.
The Holocaust developed through years of escalating persecution before Nazi Germany began implementing systematic mass murder.
I think that progression deserves attention because the final horror can sometimes make us forget all the smaller decisions that came before it.
Nobody should misuse that history by pretending every insult, prejudice or political disagreement automatically leads to another Holocaust.
That would cheapen what actually happened.
But we can still recognize something important.
The way we describe other human beings matters.
WHEN A PERSON BECOMES A LABEL
Jew.
Pole.
Roma.
Disabled.
Political prisoner.
Homosexual.
Soviet prisoner of war.
Those words can describe something about a person.
They cannot describe the entire person.
That difference is enormous.
A label becomes dangerous when somebody decides it tells them everything they need to know about another human being.
Once that happens, the individual begins disappearing.
You don’t see the father anymore.
You see the category.
You don’t see the little girl.
You see the category.
You don’t see the neighbour who has lived beside you for twenty years.
You see the category.
You don’t see somebody who loves, worries, laughs, works and dreams.
You see whatever somebody has taught you to see.
That is where dehumanization becomes powerful.
And that is why throughout HELL HOLE I keep returning to human words.
Hearts.
Souls.
Families.
Lovers.
Friends.
Men.
Women.
Children.
I want the person to keep fighting their way back through the label.
PROPAGANDA AND REPETITION
One lie may not convince everybody.
Repeat it enough and something can change.
Put it in newspapers.
Put it on posters.
Put it into speeches.
Teach it.
Make jokes about it.
Build stereotypes around it.
Blame the same people whenever something goes wrong.
Eventually somebody who would never have invented the hatred themselves may begin repeating it.
That doesn’t remove their responsibility.
It shows why propaganda matters.
Nazi propaganda did not operate separately from persecution. It helped spread antisemitic ideas and reinforce the racial worldview of the regime.
I find that frightening because propaganda doesn’t need everybody to become a fanatic.
Sometimes it only needs enough people to stop questioning what they’re hearing.
THE POWER OF LANGUAGE
Words can prepare the ground for actions.
That doesn’t mean words and murder are the same thing.
They aren’t.
But language can change how people think about what is acceptable.
If somebody is described as a neighbour, you may imagine a person.
If somebody is repeatedly described as a disease, parasite, threat or enemy, somebody is trying to change the picture inside your head.
That is why language used to dehumanize groups deserves attention.
It becomes easier to mistreat somebody when you have already convinced yourself they are something less than you.
HELL HOLE contains brutal images because the history became brutal.
But the road toward those images included words.
SILENCE
Then there is silence.
This is complicated.
I don’t like easy statements such as everybody should simply have stood up.
Standing up inside a dictatorship could have consequences.
People could lose their jobs.
They could be arrested.
They could be imprisoned.
They could be killed.
Families could be placed in danger.
Fear is real.
That is why I won’t sit comfortably decades later and pretend courage would have been automatic for me.
I don’t know what I would have done.
But silence still deserves examination.
There is the silence of fear.
The silence of agreement.
The silence of indifference.
The silence of somebody who benefits.
The silence of somebody who knows something is wrong but doesn’t believe it concerns them.
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
That makes the question harder.
When does silence protect somebody who is frightened?
When does silence protect the person committing the wrong?
I don’t have one answer that fits every situation.
But I think the question is worth asking.
OBEDIENCE
Another uncomfortable question is why ordinary people obey terrible orders.
Again, there isn’t one simple explanation.
Ideology.
Fear.
Career.
Peer pressure.
Authority.
Antisemitism.
Opportunity.
Personal gain.
Conformity.
Some perpetrators believed deeply in what they were doing.
Some participated for other reasons.
Some exceeded what was demanded of them.
And some people refused or resisted.
Human behaviour doesn’t give us one convenient answer.
That may be what makes the history useful to study.
If every perpetrator were simply an obvious monster from birth, there wouldn’t be much for the rest of us to learn about ourselves.
But human beings can adapt to systems around them.
That ability can produce cooperation and community.
It can also become dangerous when the system itself is wrong.
PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
A system is made from people.
That is something I keep coming back to.
We use words such as government, military, bureaucracy and regime because we need them.
But those things don’t have hands by themselves.
People write documents.
People sign orders.
People drive vehicles.
People guard doors.
People keep records.
People make decisions.
People carry out instructions.
That doesn’t mean everybody inside Nazi Germany had equal responsibility.
They didn’t.
Historical responsibility has to be examined carefully.
But saying “the system did it” can sometimes make the human choices inside the system disappear.
The Holocaust required enormous organization.
And organization requires people.
That is one of the reasons the story is so disturbing.
THE BYSTANDER QUESTION
What responsibility does somebody have when the person being harmed isn’t them?
That question reaches far beyond one historical event.
It is easy to care when the danger reaches our own door.
It can be harder when the person suffering speaks another language, follows another religion, lives somewhere else or belongs to a community we know little about.
HELL HOLE contains:
“Begging the world to hear our endless yells”
For me, that lyric raises the bystander question.
If you hear the yell, what happens next?
Maybe you cannot stop an entire government.
Maybe you cannot end a war.
Maybe you cannot rescue thousands.
But does that mean you can do nothing?
History gives examples of people who could not save everybody but saved somebody.
One person.
One family.
One child.
That matters.
COURAGE WITHOUT FANTASY
I respect stories of resistance and rescue.
But I don’t want to turn them into superhero stories.
The people involved were human beings.
They could be frightened and courageous at the same time.
I think sometimes we misunderstand courage by imagining that courageous people aren’t scared.
Maybe courage is more meaningful when the fear is real.
A person hides somebody knowing what could happen if they are discovered.
A prisoner shares food when they barely have enough.
Somebody preserves documents because they want evidence to survive even if they don’t.
Somebody joins an uprising knowing the odds.
Those choices become powerful precisely because the danger existed.
THE VALUE OF ONE LIFE
HELL HOLE operates on an enormous scale.
War.
Genocide.
Millions murdered.
But one of the deeper ideas underneath the song is actually very small.
One life matters.
That sounds obvious.
History shows us it isn’t always treated as obvious.
“Let’s bring out the lives that still can be saved”
I didn’t write:
What difference will a few survivors make?
I wrote:
Bring them out.
If one person can still be saved, that person isn’t a statistic.
That person is everything to somebody.
And even if nobody remains waiting for them, their life still has value.
THE CHILD
I keep returning to children because they remove so many excuses.
You cannot seriously look at a little child and claim that child created the political or economic problems of a country.
Yet children were murdered because they belonged to a population the Nazis intended to destroy.
That forces the ideology into the open.
The child doesn’t need to have done anything.
The identity is treated as the offence.
Once I understand that, the line:
“They’ll destroy every man, woman, and child”
becomes one of the clearest descriptions of where dehumanization can end.
THE DANGER OF EASY COMPARISONS
There is something else I want to say because Holocaust history is sometimes thrown into modern arguments far too casually.
Somebody doesn’t like a politician.
Hitler.
Somebody dislikes a rule.
Nazi.
Somebody sees something unfair.
Holocaust.
I don’t think that helps.
If everything becomes Hitler, nothing is Hitler.
If every injustice becomes the Holocaust, we lose our ability to understand what made the Holocaust historically specific.
We can learn from history without pretending every modern event is identical to it.
In fact, understanding the differences makes the lessons stronger.
Study what actually happened.
Study how it happened.
Then use what you learned to think more carefully about the world around you.
DON’T INHERIT THE HATRED
This matters to me too.
HELL HOLE is about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
It is not an accusation against every German person.
It certainly isn’t an accusation against Germans living generations later.
Responsibility belongs where responsibility belongs.
We should be capable of remembering crimes accurately without transferring guilt through bloodlines.
Otherwise we haven’t learned much about the danger of judging individuals by categories.
That would contradict one of the deepest ideas in the song.
See the person.
Not merely the label.
REMEMBRANCE WITHOUT REVENGE
Remembering isn’t revenge.
I don’t want somebody to leave HELL HOLE hating another group.
That would be a terrible conclusion to a song about where organized hatred can lead.
I want the opposite.
Remember the victims.
Understand the perpetrators.
Study the institutions.
Listen to survivors.
Learn how the machinery developed.
Respect the people who resisted.
Respect the people who rescued others.
Recognize the people who failed.
Ask difficult questions.
Then carry the knowledge forward without carrying somebody else’s hatred with it.
THE QUESTION HELL HOLE LEAVES ME WITH
After everything in this song, I come back to something very simple.
When do we stop seeing somebody as a human being?
Because somewhere underneath the laws, uniforms, trains, fences, gas chambers and crematoria, that question keeps appearing.
The victims remained human beings from beginning to end.
Nothing done to them changed that.
The failure was in the people and the system that stopped treating them that way.
That is the deeper meaning I carry from HELL HOLE.
The gas chambers show us the end of the road.
History asks us to understand the road that led there.
And somewhere along that road, again and again, human beings had choices.
SECTION FOUR
REFLECTION
WHAT REMAINS AFTER HELL HOLE?
HELL HOLE is not a song I expect somebody to finish and simply move on from without thinking.
There is too much behind it.
Once you understand what the title means, once you understand where the smoke and ashes come from, and once you understand who the families, lovers, friends, men, women and children were, the song becomes harder to leave behind.
Maybe that is how it should be.
Some history should make us uncomfortable.
Not because we should live permanently inside darkness, but because becoming comfortable with what happened would be worse.
THE PEOPLE WERE HERE FIRST
Before there was a Holocaust victim, there was a person.
I keep returning to that because I think it is one of the most important things on this entire page.
Before the photograph from a camp, there may have been another photograph.
A wedding.
A birthday.
A family standing together.
A child at school.
Friends laughing.
Somebody dressed up for a night out.
Ordinary life.
That is the part we should never allow the horror to erase.
The Nazis tried to reduce people to categories.
History sometimes reduces them to numbers simply because the scale is so enormous.
Remembrance has to bring the person back.
THE QUESTION I CANNOT ANSWER
What would I have done?
I don’t know.
I could tell you I would have resisted.
I could tell you I would have hidden somebody.
I could tell you I would have stood in front of the train.
That sounds good sitting safely here decades later.
But I wasn’t there.
I didn’t have a gun pointed at me.
My family wasn’t being threatened.
I wasn’t living under a dictatorship.
So I don’t think I have earned the right to pretend I know exactly how courageous I would have been.
What I can ask is what I do with the choices I have now.
Do I think for myself?
Do I question hatred when somebody tries to sell it to me?
Do I judge an individual by what they actually do or by whatever category somebody has placed them into?
Do I repeat something simply because everybody around me is repeating it?
Those are questions I can answer with my own behaviour.
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF MEMORY
The generation that experienced the Holocaust is disappearing.
Eventually, there will be no survivor sitting in front of a classroom telling students what happened.
That doesn’t mean the voices disappear.
Testimony has been recorded.
Documents survive.
Photographs survive.
Letters survive.
Buildings and ruins survive.
Personal belongings survive.
Archives preserve names.
Museums preserve evidence.
The responsibility then moves toward the people who inherit those things.
Us.
We don’t have to invent the history.
We have to preserve it accurately.
That means resisting Holocaust denial.
It also means resisting distortion.
We should not exaggerate history to make it powerful.
The truth is powerful enough.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REMEMBERING AND LIVING IN THE PAST
Remembering history doesn’t mean living in it.
I don’t wake up believing I am standing in 1943.
The world changed.
Germany changed.
Europe changed.
Generations were born who had nothing to do with the crimes of Nazi Germany.
That matters.
Historical responsibility should not become inherited hatred.
If I write an entire song about the danger of dehumanizing people and then use it to condemn somebody simply because they are German, I have contradicted my own message.
Remember what happened.
Identify who was responsible.
Study it accurately.
But see people living today as individuals.
That is part of learning too.
THE CHILDREN
Of everything on this page, I think children are the hardest to move past.
Maybe because there is nowhere to hide from that truth.
A child doesn’t understand somebody’s racial theory.
A child doesn’t design government policy.
A child doesn’t start a war.
A child wants food.
Warmth.
Safety.
A parent.
A toy.
A friend.
Tomorrow.
Yet children were deliberately included among the people Nazi Germany intended to destroy.
That should stop us.
Not for five seconds.
Long enough to understand what an ideology has become when murdering a child can be treated as part of accomplishing a goal.
THE PEOPLE WHO SURVIVED
There is another side of remembrance that matters.
Survivors lived.
Sometimes when we talk about Holocaust survivors, we talk only about what was done to them.
But many went on to build lives.
They married.
Had children.
Built careers.
Created businesses.
Wrote books.
Made art.
Taught.
Spoke publicly.
Some spent decades educating people about what happened.
Some did not want to speak about it.
There is no single correct way to survive something.
I think survival deserves to be recognized as more than simply not dying.
People had to discover how to live again.
That takes me back to:
“In holes or in hearts, no ending—just the start”
Maybe the start is there too.
Not only the beginning of grief.
The beginning of another life.
A different life than the one somebody expected.
But life.
THE PEOPLE WHO NEVER CAME HOME
Then there are the people who didn’t get that second beginning.
They cannot tell us what they would have become.
That is another part of mass murder that numbers cannot show.
We don’t only lose the person standing there at that moment.
We lose everything that person might have done afterward.
The children they might have had.
The music they might have written.
The businesses they might have built.
The discoveries they might have made.
The friendships they might have formed.
The ordinary Tuesday mornings they should have been allowed to experience.
A murdered future cannot be counted as easily as a murdered person.
But it was taken too.
THE HELL HOLE WAS BUILT BY PEOPLE
That may be the most uncomfortable thought I carry from this entire story.
Human beings built it.
Human beings designed the camps.
Human beings wrote the regulations.
Human beings organized deportations.
Human beings guarded prisoners.
Human beings operated the machinery.
Human beings made decisions.
That doesn’t mean everybody was equally responsible.
Historical responsibility has different levels and must be understood carefully.
But the gas chambers did not appear naturally from the ground.
People created them.
And that means the Holocaust cannot be dismissed as something beyond human behaviour.
It was human behaviour.
At its worst.
THE GATES WERE OPENED BY PEOPLE TOO
There is another truth.
Human beings resisted.
Human beings rescued others.
Human beings hid families.
Human beings shared food.
Human beings preserved evidence.
Human beings fought.
Human beings survived.
And eventually human beings opened the gates.
I don’t say that to create some artificial balance between good and evil.
There is no balancing six million murdered Jewish people with a few comforting stories.
The scale of the crime remains what it was.
But the existence of different choices matters.
If people were capable of participating, people were also capable of refusing.
Not always safely.
Not always successfully.
But choices existed.
WHAT DO WE DO WITH THAT?
I don’t want HELL HOLE to tell somebody exactly what to think about every modern problem.
That would turn history into a political weapon.
I would rather it encourage something more useful.
Think.
Check what you are being told.
Learn history before using it as an argument.
Don’t allow somebody to hand you an entire group of people and tell you that every one of them is the same.
Don’t confuse disagreement with dehumanization.
Don’t confuse criticism with hatred.
But recognize genuine hatred when you see it.
Recognize antisemitism.
Recognize racism.
Recognize propaganda.
Recognize when somebody is trying to make cruelty easier by making another person appear less human.
And don’t become so convinced of your own goodness that you stop questioning yourself.
THE LINE I KEEP COMING BACK TO
“Let’s bring out the lives that still can be saved”
Out of everything I wrote in HELL HOLE, this may be the line I want to carry forward.
We cannot bring back the people murdered in the Holocaust.
We cannot reopen history and change the outcome.
But the instinct inside that lyric still means something.
If somebody can be helped, help them.
If somebody can be heard, listen.
If somebody is being reduced to a label, remember there is a person underneath it.
If history can prevent ignorance, teach it.
If testimony can be preserved, preserve it.
If a name can be remembered, remember it.
ONE LAST LOOK BACK
HELL HOLE began in the middle of the night.
Firing from east and west.
People running.
People yelling for the world to hear them.
Then it carried us toward something much darker.
The camps.
The gas chambers.
The skeletons.
The smoke.
The charcoal.
The ashes.
Families.
Lovers.
Friends.
Men.
Women.
Children.
And finally:
“The weight of it all could make this hell hole fall”
It did fall.
Nazi Germany was defeated.
The camps were liberated.
The killing machinery was stopped.
But that isn’t where responsibility for the story ends.
Now it belongs to memory.
I cannot speak for the people who were there.
I will never pretend that I can.
What I can do is look at their history with respect.
I can write what it made me feel.
I can point somebody toward the people who actually survived it.
And I can refuse to treat millions of murdered human beings as nothing more than an old number in a history book.
That is what HELL HOLE leaves with me.
Not hatred.
Not revenge.
Memory.
The hell hole fell.
The people should never disappear with it.
MOITA
WHERE EVERY SONG TELLS A STORY
EVERY STORY TEACHES SOMETHING
SECTION FIVE
DOCUMENTARY & LEARNING CENTRE
BEYOND HELL HOLE
HELL HOLE ends as a song, but the history behind it doesn’t end there.
I can tell you what inspired me.
I can tell you what I see inside my lyrics.
I can tell you what this history makes me think about.
But I wasn’t there.
The people who experienced the Holocaust deserve to have their own voices heard, and the historical record deserves to be studied through places that preserve the evidence carefully.
That is what this final section is for.
If HELL HOLE made you curious, don’t stop with my song.
Go further.
THE HOLOCAUST
The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators.
It developed between 1933 and 1945.
The Nazis did not begin by immediately carrying out mass murder. Persecution became increasingly radical over time. Discriminatory laws, exclusion, organized violence and antisemitic ideology eventually developed into systematic genocide.
During World War II, the Nazis and their allies and collaborators murdered Jewish people through deadly living conditions, brutal mistreatment, mass shootings, gassings and specially designed killing centers.
Understanding that progression matters.
If we study only the gas chambers, we see the end of the road.
We also need to understand how human beings reached it.
AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU
Auschwitz has become one of the strongest symbols of the Holocaust.
More than 1.1 million men, women and children lost their lives at the Auschwitz camp complex. Auschwitz originally functioned as a concentration camp and later became the largest Nazi concentration camp and extermination center.
At Birkenau, gas chambers and crematoria became part of the machinery of mass murder.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial preserves the physical remains of this history, including camp buildings, fences, the railway ramp and the ruins of gas chambers and crematoria.
That physical evidence matters.
You can read the words “gas chamber.”
Standing in a place where one actually existed is something entirely different.
THE GAS CHAMBERS
Because the gas chambers are central to what I meant by HELL HOLE, I think they should be understood accurately rather than through movies, rumours or imagination.
At Auschwitz, Zyklon B was first used to kill prisoners in 1941. Provisional gas chambers were later established at Birkenau, followed by four large gas chamber and crematorium complexes that began operating in 1943.
Men, women and children selected for death were taken into gas chambers and murdered.
Their bodies were then burned in crematorium furnaces, pits or pyres.
Those facts are difficult.
They should be.
But this is also where I want to repeat something that has followed us through the entire page.
Don’t stop at the machinery.
Remember the person who entered it.
THE ATTEMPT TO DESTROY THE EVIDENCE
As Nazi Germany collapsed and Soviet forces approached Auschwitz, the SS attempted to destroy evidence of what had happened there.
In January 1945, tens of thousands of prisoners were evacuated from Auschwitz. Camp records were burned, and gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau were blown up.
When Red Army troops entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, they found about 7,000 prisoners remaining, many of them sick and physically exhausted.
The ruins remain today.
The attempt to destroy evidence became part of the evidence.
WHY ORIGINAL SOURCES MATTER
There is an enormous amount of information about the Holocaust online.
Not all of it deserves equal trust.
For something this serious, I would rather send somebody toward museums, archives, preserved historical sites, original documents and survivor testimony than toward somebody shouting an opinion on the internet.
Ask questions.
I believe in that.
Question history.
Question what you’re reading.
Question what I wrote.
But then follow the evidence.
Look at documents.
Look at photographs.
Listen to testimony.
Compare reliable historical sources.
Learning should make us more curious, not less.
SURVIVOR TESTIMONY
If there is one thing I would encourage somebody to do after reading HELL HOLE, it is to listen to people who actually survived the Holocaust.
Hear their voices.
Look at their faces.
Learn where they lived before the war.
Learn about their families.
Learn what happened to them.
Learn what they did afterward.
A survivor is not simply evidence of a crime.
They are a human being with an entire life.
That is one of the reasons the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia is valuable. Along with historical articles, it provides photographs, maps, films, timelines and individual identification cards that help connect the enormous history to individual experiences.
THE PHOTOGRAPHS BEFORE THE CAMPS
When you study this history, don’t look only at photographs taken inside the camps.
Look at photographs from before.
That is something I think can change the way we understand the victims.
Look at weddings.
Families.
Schools.
Businesses.
Children playing.
People standing in front of their homes.
People dressed for an evening out.
People doing ordinary things.
Then you understand what was actually destroyed.
Not merely bodies.
Lives.
Communities.
Futures.
THE QUESTIONS WORTH CARRYING
After HELL HOLE, I don’t want to hand somebody a political answer sheet.
I would rather leave them with questions.
How does prejudice become acceptable?
How does propaganda work?
Why do people follow authority even when what they are being asked to do is wrong?
Why do some people participate in persecution?
Why do some remain silent?
Why do some resist?
Why do some risk their lives for strangers?
How can governments and institutions become involved in crimes on an enormous scale?
How do we remember victims without reducing them only to the way they died?
How do we study terrible history without turning it into hatred against people living generations later?
Those questions are bigger than one song.
That is exactly why they belong here.
CONTINUE EXPLORING
If you want to continue beyond HELL HOLE, these are the places I recommend starting.
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM — HOLOCAUST ENCYCLOPEDIA
The Holocaust Encyclopedia contains hundreds of articles along with photographs, maps, historical film, timelines and individual stories. It covers the rise of Nazi Germany, antisemitism, ghettos, deportations, killing centers, resistance, liberation and the aftermath of the Holocaust.
This is where I would begin if I wanted to understand the larger history surrounding the song.
AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU MEMORIAL AND MUSEUM
The official Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial preserves the authentic site of the former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp.
The Memorial includes Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau and preserves buildings, ruins, archives, collections and other physical evidence of the crimes committed there.
Because the gas chambers and crematoria are directly connected to the imagery in HELL HOLE, this resource allows somebody to go far beyond my interpretation and study the documented history of Auschwitz itself.
WHAT TO EXPLORE NEXT
Don’t stop at Auschwitz.
Learn about Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust.
Learn about antisemitism.
Learn about Nazi propaganda.
Learn about the ghettos.
Learn about mass shootings in eastern Europe.
Learn about deportations.
Learn about Treblinka, Bełżec, Sobibór and Chełmno.
Learn about concentration camps and understand how they differed from killing centers.
Learn about forced labour.
Learn about Jewish resistance.
Learn about rescuers.
Learn about liberation.
Learn about displaced persons after the war.
Learn about the trials of Nazi perpetrators.
And most importantly, learn people’s names.
HELL HOLE started with an image of people begging the world to hear them.
Decades later, many of their voices remain available through testimony, diaries, letters, photographs, documents and the memories preserved by their families.
We can still hear them.
The question is whether we are willing to listen.
That is where I want to leave this page.
Not with Hitler.
Not with a gas chamber.
Not with smoke.
Not even with the hell hole.
With the people.
Because before there was a Holocaust, there were lives.
Before there were victims, there were people.
And after the hell hole fell, their history remained.
MOITA
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