Wire recordings of Holocaust survivors singing melodies at a refugee camp in France in 1946 have been heard for the first time in decades, thanks to university employees in Ohio who pieced together a device to listen to them.

The University of Akron says the six songs were sung by survivors in Henonville, France, for Dr. David Boder, a psychologist who was among the first people to record Holocaust survivors telling their stories. He recorded on steel wire, capturing the melodies with lyrics in Yiddish and German.

Some spools were donated to the university in the 1960s and archived, but the content wasn’t discovered until a recent project to digitize the recordings.

The Akron Beacon Journal reports one woman sang melodies that had been sung in a Polish ghetto and a forced-labor camp.

(AP)