Red Sector A

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"Red Sector A"

Single by Rush
from the album Grace Under Pressure
Released	1984
Genre	Progressive Rock
Length	5:09
Rush singles chronology
"The Body Electric" (1984)	"Red Sector A" (1984)	"Afterimage" (1984)
Grace Under Pressure track listing
"Afterimage" (Track 2)	"Red Sector A" (Track 3)	"The Enemy Within" (Track 4)

Red Sector A is a song by Rush that chronicles The Holocaust. Perhaps the most well-known of Holocaust-influenced rock songs, Red Sector A first appeared on the band's hit 1984 album Grace Under Pressure, and has been a staple of the band's live shows ever since.

The song was inspired by Geddy Lee's memories of his mother's stories about the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, where she was held prisoner.

1 History
2 Lyrics
3 Video
4 Sources
5 External links

[edit] History

The seeds for Red Sector A were planted over 60 years ago in April 1945 when British soldiers liberated the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Rush bassist & vocalist Geddy Lee’s mother, Manya (now Mary) Rubenstein, was among the survivors. Lee's 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."

Lee related the story to band drummer and lyricist Neil Peart, who took that sentiment and wrote Red Sector A. Peart came up with lines such as:

Are we the last ones left alive?

Are we the only human beings to survive?

"The whole album," Lee said of Grace Under Pressure, "is about being on the brink and having the courage and strength to survive."

In a 1984 interview Neil Peart describes writing Red Sector A:

"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, and this person, she was a young girl, like thirteen years old when she was sent into it, and lived in it for a few years, and then, uh, 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, they just never, ever wanted to be the ones who were shot, you know, they were always the unlucky ones, which was an important thing that I wanted to bring out. And also, what I learned from the first person nonfiction accounts that I read was that these people would keep their little rituals of their religion, and whatever, and if it was supposed to be a fasting day, even if they were starving to death, they would turn down their little bit of bread and their little bit of gruel, because this was a fasting day, and they had to hold on to something, some essence of normality, you know, that was important. And that moved me, you know. That's, that's intense.

...I wanted to take a little bit out of being specific and, 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. You know, the people liberating them and themselves were the only surviving people in the world, and it sounds a bit melodramatic put into a song I realize, but the point is that it's true, so, you know, I didn't feel like I needed to avoid it as being over-dramatic, because, you know, I heard of it and read of it in more than one account."

The song title 'Red Sector A' was named for the area in which the band witnessed the launch of Columbia on April 12th, 1981.