The Rapping Holocaust Survivor. Yes, The Rapping Holocaust Survivor.

Brace yourself. The endlessly, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly fascinating phenomenon of people who you wouldn’t expect to rap actually rapping is back for another go. This one’s somehow even better and worse than previous iterations. Sigh. Here’s Der Spiegel:

The sound is a familiar one: driving beats, austere rhymes, forceful vocals supported by female backup singers. Standard hip hop, it would seem. And yet, something doesn’t seem quite right. The lyrics-some are Yiddish, others Hebrew, still others Italian. And then there’s that voice. It’s certainly too old to be coming from a hip hop artist, isn’t it?

Uh huh. 85-year-old Esther Bejarano, one of the last surviving members of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, has teamed up with the German rap group Microphone Mafia and made a hip-hop album, Per La Vita.The aim is to raise youth awareness of the dangers of fascism. I don’t know. It’s hard to knock folks when their hearts are in the right place. Harder still when one of them lost her parents and sister in the Holocaust, and only escaped herself during a death march to Ravensbrück in 1945. And at the very least, you’d hope the project might find its way to one of the worst-named groups ever to release an album in any genre, Baton Rouge rappers the Concentration Camp.

The group’s ill-considered name (y’know, they’re concentrating really hard on their lyrics) has always seemed especially sad because one of its members, Young Bleed (top-right on the cover), is really, really good. His 1998 solo album My Balls & My Word is one of the great underappreciated works of southern rap-the best thing, by a ways, ever to come out on Master P’s No Limit Records. Listen to the single, “Keep It Real.” (I know, I know. But we’ve already established name-choosing as a weakness, right?)

As for her rapping partners, Bejarano likes them, and plans to record another album with them soon. But there have been some creative differences. “They are very nice people,” she says. “But they are a bit chaotic. They jump around on the stage a lot. I told them maybe they should tone it down a bit.”