Marilyn B. Meyers, Ph.D. IPA Congress Prague 2013 In the fall of 1941, the Germans turned the town of Theresienstadt into a ghetto and renamed it Terezin.The orders for the deportations were issued directly from Adolph Eichmann. A total of 44,693 individuals were sent to Auschwitz from Therezin where all but a few perished. The highest number of prisoners at any one time was 58,497. Of the 140,000 inmates in Therezin, including 17,000 children, most did not survive. Terezin, was unique in that many of the prisoners were distinguished artists, scholars, composers, poets and writers. It has been called both the moral conscience of the silent world (Toll, p.39) and the paradise ghetto. The creative efforts and gifts of the people in the Ghetto served to keep spirits alive in the context of inhuman conditions, death, disease and threats of annihilation. It was a surreal combination of death and creativity. One 1
historian said Where there was not food for the body there was food for the soul If Terzin was not hell itself, like Auschwitz, it was the anteroom to hell. culture was still possible, and for many this frenetic clinging to an almost hypertrophy of culture was the final assurance. We are human beings and we remain human beings despite everything. In 1943, Rafael Schaecter, a prominent composer and musician from Prague organized a chorus of 150 Jews to perform the Verdi Requiem (the Mass for the Dead) in the Terezin ghetto. He became obsessed with the performances of this music despite the fact that deportations to Auschwitz drastically depleted the chorus many times. Schaecter possessed one copy of the Verdi score, and, of course, no instrumental orchestra; he only had access to a legless upright piano. One survivor described Schaecter as a crazed man on a mission. Schaecter s selection of the Verdi Requiem was challenged and much disputed within the ghetto. The Council of Elders argued that performing the liturgical music might be viewed as an apology for being Jewish. The arguments were intense, but Schaecter insisted that We can sing to them what we cannot say to them. 2
These are the first words of Verdi s Requiem: Liber scriptus: A written book will be brought forth, In which everything is contained, For which the world shall be judged. And so when the Judge takes his seat, And whatever is hidden shall be made manifest, Nothing shall remain unavenged. I would like to share with you the very moving and inspirational experience that I had in attending the performance of the Verdi Requiem in Terezin, where,in 2006, it was performed in the ghetto for the first time since 1944. I was privileged to be there and to meet Edgar and Hana Krasa : both survivors of the ghetto. Edgar sang in the chorus performing the Verdi Requiem in Terezin 16 times. The concert drama consists of an uncut performance of the Verdi Requiem, 3
portions of the infamous Nazi propaganda film showing the ruse for the benefit of the Swiss Red Cross, filmed testimony given by survivors (Edgar and others) and three actors portraying key figures in the ghetto. The performance concludes with the chorus and orchestra soundlessly leaving the stage while a solo violinist plays the mournful Oseh Shalom music drawn from the Kaddish prayer for the dead: May he who makes peace on high make peace for us below. After the performance one survivor in the audience said: I listen to the Requiem with desperation, as though I never heard music before. I can t clearly describe the actual physical effect it had on us. People have asked me so often, how did the chorus sound? But I can only respond with words about what the music meant to me. I don t think I can describe the sound of the chorus. I just know that I listened and heard desperately. It s not as though they weren t singing, of course they were, but what I heard was the music coming from them; the music, not just the sounds of the music, but a clear, enveloping of all that this music was created to mean! I achieved a relationship with music I never knew as possible. For the first time in my life maybe the only time-i listened with the same focus and intensity with which I would have run to grab a piece of bread that someone had dropped. But this music was not merely nourishing, but consuming. 4
Listening was not the normal and usual option, but no option, an absolute necessity. (Timothy Sprehe web site) As Nancy and I were working on our book and thinking about what to include, I said We have to talk to Edgar and Hana So I contacted them and arranged for us to visit their home in Boston.. We recorded our visit and include parts of the transcript in the Defiant Requiem chapter in our book. We see Edgar and Hana as symbolizing much of what we emphasize in our book. They are witnesses to their own experiences, keep the memories alive and are full of vitality. The trauma is neither denied nor does it rule their lives. They are determined to remember and bear witness without remaining frozen in the past. Their children and grandchildren keep the stories in their minds as well. Their house sits on a quiet residential street in a suburb of Boston. The home was filled with family pictures parents, children, grandchildren. One room in the house is reserved almost exclusively for art work from Terezin and other memorabilia from that time. We include photos of much of the art displayed in that room in our book. The dining table was set for the four of us. Edgar was prepared to feed us. 5
He invited us into the kitchen which was abuzz with activity. In fact, the entire time that we were with them, we ate. Edgar had been a cook, both in Prague and in Terezin and elsewhere after the war Israel, Switzerland and Tanganyika. He was determined to feed us. The meal began with homemade hummus, followed by cauliflower soup, omelets, bread, salad, and home made cranberry nut cake. We felt immediately at home as if we were family. We talked as we ate, pretty much non-stop. Our eating together served as both a back drop and a diversion. It was notable that in listening to the recordings and reading the transcript afterwards, serving, eating and commenting on food distracted us from some of the trauma in the conversation. 6
Following are excerpts of our conversations with Edgar and Hana in which they generously spoke of their life in Terezin: p.11/81 We began our first meeting by attempting to explain why we were there: We spoke about our interest in hearing their story as we were dedicating ourselves to witnessing. We wanted to know about their survival and how they managed to speak of their experiences in Terezin and after the war. Edgar: I never had time to think about it I had to work I came from Auschwitz with absolutely nothing. Edgar: My parents came with almost nothing back from Terezin, so I had to work really, I had two jobs and then having been a cook there was not much to cook with (after the war). Nancy: How did you get the sense to be silent What was it that let you know, don t talk about it? Hana: People told us straight away when we came back. 7
Nancy : They told you? Hana: Straight away when we came back. Don t talk about it. Nancy: Who told you? Friends? Relatives? Hana: everybody. We did not have relatives any more, but the people we met, the friends of my parents. They didn t even want to know what happened to them. Forget it, that happened, now it s a different time. It was the first thing we heard. Nancy: So you would just talk to each other. Hana: We wouldn t even talk to each other In Czechoslovakia it was silent through the whole community. When they were showing Terezin, they were only showing a small part of it, they were not showing the ghetto. Everything about the ghetto was erased. Only in 1991 the first museum in Terezin opened.it was very hard I couldn t bear it, I didn t see the place where we were, nobody did It s a little town that they spruced up not the camp we were used to. 8
We ask about Auschwitz. (Edgar was deported there, Schaecter died there after being deported. Hana s parents died there. Hana: Nobody had the idea that Auschwitz was a death camp, but we knew that it was something very bad, people were allowed to write postcards thirty words in one month, and a few people wrote from Auschwitz they wrote I saw Uncle M this was a code they knew he was in a concentration camp they turned it backwards. Nobody wanted to believe. Edgar: There was one guy who escaped from Auschwitz an SS man in Auschwitz (a former classmate of this inmate ) helped him. He gave this guy a uniform and took him out on a motorcycle to Terezin he told the Council of Elders about Auschwitz and they dismissed it because nothing like that is possible..they wouldn t let him talk about it they didn t let him mention it to anyone else there was a group who was helping the people to disembark, those who came and loaded them when they were deported one of them told his friend who was deported in his wagon there is a loose 9
frame, a small window at the top. Put under that frame the name of where you are going he put Auschwitz but it didn t mean anything because he put it before he got off and found out what Auschwitz was just the name Auschwitz didn t help. Over the years since their terrible experiences and unspeakable losses, Edgar and Hana have devoted their lives to preserving memory and educating children about the Holocaust. They are fully aware of the dangers of hatred; however, they are not bitter people but fully engaged in life. They never miss a performance of the Verdi Requime. They have traveled to Portland, Oregon, Washington, DC, Atlanta, New York, Prague, Budapest, Israel. The participation in the chorus in Terezin kept hope alive and lives on in them. 10