However passionately we might issue death threats to each other in the Beatles vs Beach Boys threads, one thing's for sure: music isn't actually a matter of life and death for us.
Sadly, it could become so in Nazi-occupied Poland. Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List is a kind of novelized history based on 50 survivors' interviews that TK collected in 1980/81. For the pedantically minded, his book is catalogued as fiction, though it's full of facts and accounts that are uncontested afaik.
One anecdote is about 16-year-old Haubenstock, who "had been heard singing Volga, Volga and other banned Russian songs with the intention, according to his death sentence, of winning the Ukranian guards over to Bolshevism." (At the time, Ukranian guards, like other police/army units were implementing orders coming, ultimately, from Berlin.)
It's hard to read the details of how this innocent boy, after begging for his life, was shot by SS officer Amon Goeth, the camp commander made infamous by Spielberg's excellent movie.
My Opinion: A robust, moving song, clearly full of pride and yearning for the Volga region: a classic, apparently, of Russian folk music. If it sounds familiar, that may be because it was turned into "The Carnival Is Over" by Tom Springfield of The Seekers.
Good song, and R.I.P. poor Haubenstock (1927- 1943), shot for taking solace in music.
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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953
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