Peart based song on Holocaust survivor’s account

Jewish Telegraph, January 2020

RUSH drummer Neil Peart, who died from brain cancer last week, wrote the lyrics to the Canadian band’s song based on the Holocaust.
Red Sector A, featured on the band’s 1984 album Grace Under Pressure, and was inspired by singer Geddy Lee’s mother’s account of the Holocaust.
Peart, who was 67, explained:” I read a first person account of someone who had survived the whole system of trains and work camps and Bergen-Belsen and all of that . . . through first person accounts from other people who came out at the end of it, always glad to be alive, which again was the essence of grace, grace under pressure is that through all of it, these people never gave up the strong will to survive, through the utmost horror, and total physical privations of all kinds.”
He added that the song intentionally evokes images of Holocaust concentration camps, but he left the lyrics ambiguous enough that they could relate to other prison camps.
Peart, nicknamed The Professor, said: “I wanted to take a little bit out of being specific and just describe the circumstances and try to look at the way people responded to it, and another really important and to me really moving image that I got from a lot of these accounts was that at the end of it, these people, of course, had been totally isolated from the rest of the world, from their families, from any news at all, and they, in cases that I read, believed that they were the last people surviving.”
Lee’s mother, Manya (Mary) Rubenstein, was liberated from Bergen-Belsen in April, 1945, while his father, Morris Weinrib, was liberated from the Dachau concentration camp a few weeks later.
“I once asked my mother her first thoughts upon being liberated,” Lee said. “She didn’t believe liberation was possible. She didn’t believe that if there was a society outside the camp how they could allow this to exist, so she believed society was done in.”
Many of Peart’s lyrics for Rush were also inspired by controversial Jewish author Ayn Rand, who was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in St Petersburg in 1905.
Peart once wrote in Canadian newspaper The Standard about growing up in the suburbs of Port Dalhousie, St Catharines, Ontario.
“Until I was in my teens I didn’t know a single black person, or an Asian, or even an American,” he wrote. “I didn’t know what it meant to be Jewish, and I didn’t think I knew any of them either.”
Lee and Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson called Peart their “friend, soul brother and bandmate over 45 years”.
They added: “Those wishing to express their condolences can choose a cancer research group or charity of their choice and make a donation in Neil Peart’s name. Rest in peace, brother.”
Kiss frontmen Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons both took to social media to pay tribute to Peart.
In Rush’s early years, they regularly supported Kiss on tour.
Stanley tweeted: “There are multitudes of great drummers . . . And then there was Neil.”
Simmons added: “My prayers and condolences to the Peart Family, Fans and Friends. Neil was a kind soul. R.I.P.”
Bruce Springsteen drummer Max Weinberg had happy memories of Peart. He tweeted: “Drumming legend as we all know but a truly kind man. Personally arranged for my son, Jay (then a teenager) to open at a venue in Boston for Rush. Huge for an aspiring drummer!”