"Stranger on a Train - 1944"

From Joka by Gidon Carmel and Kyle Morton

In 2022, I was asked by Berlin-based songwriter/instrumentalist, Gidon Carmel, to record and produce a record he was writing about his paternal grandmother, Joka, a Hungarian Jew who survived Auschwitz.

This was one of the most intensely emotional projects I had ever worked on and, over time, Gidon and I developed a close artistic relationship: co-writing the songs, singing the songs together. We also became friends.

The idea for the record began with a question: “Is it possible to remember someone you never met?”

In 2018, Gidon came across a box of letters in his parents’ basement, most of them written by his grandmother who had died shortly before he was born. It felt like he was getting to know her for the first time.

The record is called Joka and it will be released in June 2026. Each song is told from the perspective of someone who knew Gidon’s grandmother—some of them quite closely (her mother, her husband) and some whose paths crossed only briefly.

These are the first two songs from the record, “Prelude” and “Stranger on a Train - 1944.” The latter is told from the perspective of an unnamed person riding in the train car with Joka and her mother and brother, from Gyula, Hungary to Auschwitz in Poland.

At the time of writing, my own country is rapidly constructing its own archipelago of concentration camps while masked paramilitary squads roam the streets, openly engaged in a project of ethnic cleansing. Recently they have begun murdering citizens. History neither repeats nor rhymes, but it does teach us what is possible.

It is our hope that this project—about a woman who lived and died in the previous century—will help to reflect on our own moment. Good and evil resides nascent in all of us.

Which hand will you pick?

Prelude

Stranger on a Train - 1944

Mixed by Jeff Stuart Saltzman
Mastered by Adam Gonsalves
Released by popuprecords
Available on all streaming services (except Spotify)