Song lyrics for  Prince Bettliegend were written by prisoner František Kovanic to melodies by interwar composer Jaroslav Ježek. 

(from Performing Captivity, Performing Escape, ed. Lisa Peschel)

Prince Bettliegend was one of three revues performed in the ghetto by a group of actors that formed around the comic duo Josef Lustig and Jiří Štefl (né Spitz). Their fellow prisoner František Kowanitz (also written Kovanic) wrote the song lyrics; most of them were set to popular melodies by Jaroslav Ježek, the legendary composer for renowned interwar Prague theatre, the Liberated Theatre of Voskovec and Werich. The Czech-language texts were found in the archives of the Jewish Museum in Prague. According to a note on the typescript, they were copied from a manuscript in the possession of survivor Dr. Josef Bor in March 1970. Although all were preserved in a file for Prince Bettliegend, the sheer number and variety of the texts suggests that some may have been written for the duo's other revues. In 1993 the song lyrics were published in an appendix to Ludmila Vrkočová's book Requiem for Themselves, an account of the cultural life of the ghetto based mainly upon survivor testimony from the 1980s, as preserved by survivor Marta Fantlová-Neumannová.

The Czech-language originals and German translations by Michael Woegerbauer were published in Divadelní texty z terezínského ghetta / Theatretexte aus dem GhettoTheresienstadt, 1941-45 (2008). The English-language translations published in Performing Captivity, Performing Escape (2014) were by Lisa Peschel and Petr Liebl.  Two of the songs ('My Suitcase and Me' and 'Final song from Prinz Bettliegend')  were retranslated for the New Budapest Orpheum Society by Cheryl Coons.