The call came deep in the night, a call to speak out that roused Dawn Carroll from sleep. Words came to a song she needed to write. Carroll’s mind had been churning after she chanced to see a TV interview earlier that evening. It was part of a piece shot several years before about “Lest We Forget”, a touring exhibit of photo portraits of Holocaust survivors mounted by German-Italian artist Luigi Toscano. When the exhibit traveled to a new city, Toscano added new photos of local Holocaust survivors. In Boston, nine new photos were added. One was the face of Wellesley resident Tania Lefman. She spoke to the TV interviewer for little more than a minute, but her words sounded an alarm for Carroll.
“It really affected me” said Carroll, a songwriter and designer who also leads the Over the Shoulder Foundation, a mentoring organization she founded with singer Patti Austin. “Tania changed my life in one brief interview. She dope-slapped me and put some much needed sense into my brain. I thought I was tuned in and educated, but Tania’s story gave me an instant appreciation for what I did not know, for what I needed to re-think.”
Lefman was 12-years-old when the Nazis invaded Poland. “I hid underground” she said in the interview, “like shallow grave, almost for two-and-a-half years. It was beyond description … the hunger, the cold …” The interview originally aired four days after the 2018 Tree of Life shootings at a Pittsburgh synagogue where a heavily-armed white nationalist killed 11 people and wounded six more.
“Look what’s going on. Would you believe that our country would have (neo-Nazi) demonstrations like that?” Lefman said, referring to the violent gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 where neo-Nazis chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’ marched through the streets. “I couldn’t believe it could happen ever” Lefman said. “But you see it can happen anywhere. And it starts slowly.”
Slowly.
The word stuck in Carroll’s head and would not leave, along with Lefman’s admonition that we not stay silent in the face of hatred.
“Because of Tania” Carroll said, “I realized things about myself and who I wanted to be-and about the cost of being silent. I felt ashamed that I worried about the repercussions of speaking up. I let her words sink in and I felt inspired and empowered. Tania gave me courage.”
Carroll could not stop thinking of Lefman. “I never had such a weird night in my life” Carroll said. “You think you know what’s going on in the world, but she showed me how little I knew. And then, in the middle of the night, this song came to me like a thunderstorm. It was done by 5 AM.”
The song is “Slowly”. ‘Open your eyes’ the lyrics warn, ‘it happens slowly/When you start to lose control/When you let them steal your soul’.
Carroll’s frequent collaborators, Boston rock veteran Jon Butcher, Sandy Macdonald helped set Carroll’s words and music, together they recorded a demo version of “Slowly”. Though the song does not directly reference Tania Lefman or her story, Carroll found her address and mailed the demo for her approval.
“Her daughter wrote me back;’ Carroll said. “They’re very happy about it.”
Then unexpectedly, “Slowly” took on a new relevancy. In the final stage of its recording, as strings were being added before the final mix, Russia invaded Ukraine.
“When I wrote the song” Carroll said, “I was thinking about the horrors of what one man could do so slowly, and yet so quickly, while few were watching or paying attention. A few weeks ago those thoughts were about Hitler, about Trump. Today they are about Putin.”
“History repeats itself and we see this horror in Ukraine. I think anyone with a heart and a conscience is experiencing survivor guilt. How can we experience the things we enjoy without hearing the weeping of all these children in Ukraine and around the world? We need to stop being scared or wobbly in our beliefs. We need to invest in each other. We need to encourage courage and end this endless curse of cruelty.”
“I do believe that music can get across borders and get through thick skulls” Carroll said. “I want to hear more songs addressing what’s going on in the world, like the protest songs of the ‘60s. Where are the great songwriters today?”
