00:00 Brother Erich Frost was a young man in Germany
00:04 who set a good example in making wise decisions early in life.
00:09 He was born in 1900, baptized 23 years later,
00:14 and entered the full-time ministry in 1928.
00:18 Not long after, he was put in charge of the underground work
00:21 of the persecuted Witnesses of Jehovah in Germany,
00:25 caring well for that assignment for eight months
00:29 until he was incarcerated.
00:31 In this archived audio recording,
00:34 you will hear the fascinating experience of how Brother Frost
00:38 composed a Kingdom melody in the middle of Sachsenhausen
00:42 —a Nazi concentration camp.
00:49 I always had the desire to compose music.
00:57 As everybody knows, we had the hardest work
00:59 and suffered the hardest in the concentration camps.
01:03 We were starved, the labor
01:05 exceeded our strength, and the harassment was often unbearable.
01:18 So, as usual, I wanted to find a way to build up the brothers.
01:23 We had such a fine unity there in the Sachsenhausen camp.
01:29 I felt moved to compose a song
01:31 that we could sing together for our mutual encouragement.
01:41 Every morning we marched to the construction site
01:43 of a sewage plant in Oranienburg.
01:49 Our labor group consisted of about 40 brothers
01:52 under the strict watch of the SS.
02:02 While marching, my mind went back and forth
02:07 and “Bum Bam Badam Bam Tarambambamba.”
02:13 And gradually, a melody formed.
02:17 That’s how the music was developed.
02:19 But how could the verses enter the camp
02:22 without being able to write them down?
02:24 I found a few brothers who helped me.
02:28 I repeated the first verse to one of them until he knew it by heart,
02:32 either while marching or while driving the wheelbarrow at work.
02:35 I told the second verse to another brother,
02:38 still to others the third and the fourth.
02:43 In the evening, I asked each of the brothers to recite his verse.
02:47 That’s how the song came to life.
02:50 In the mornings, when the 40 of us were marching
02:54 through the streets of Oranienburg, we already felt worn out.
02:58 When one started humming that melody,
03:01 the entire labor group trembled with excitement.
03:04 We had to control ourselves to not break out in loud singing.
03:09 That would have been dangerous, of course.
03:11 They would have brought us back to the camp
03:13 and severely punished us.
04:19 As we sat together in the evenings and someone started humming that melody,
04:23 quite a number of us sang along, and we rejoiced.
04:28 Our eyes were shining.
04:30 This gave us new courage and hope.
04:39 We also had evenings of worship.
04:41 Talks were given, and we had copies of The Watchtower that we studied together.
04:46 So we were able to have some real times of peace
04:49 and special encouragement and felt uplifted by that song.
05:49 Brother Frost, who was one of the anointed,
05:54 finished his earthly course in 1987.
05:58 After World War II and nine years of imprisonment,
06:02 he served as the overseer of our branch office
06:04 in Germany for ten years.
06:06 This was before the arrangement was instituted
06:09 of having a Branch Committee oversee the work.
06:13 The very descriptive paintings that you saw in this segment
06:17 were painted by a brother who was imprisoned
06:20 in a concentration camp similar to the one Brother Frost was in.
06:24 And I’m sure you recognized the song.
06:27 You can find it in our songbook, though the tune is a little different.
06:32 When Brother Frost found out that his song had been included in it,
06:36 he was overjoyed and said, “My clumsy lyrics
06:40 were transformed into three wonderful verses.”
06:44 If you turn to song 17 in your songbook,
06:47 you’ll find the song originally composed by Brother Frost
06:51 —“Forward, You Witnesses!”
