You are my witnesses.
Isaiah 43:10

Sunday, April 9, 2017

Wichita Community Holocaust Commemoration April 26, 2017

Please join us for the Wichita Community Holocaust Commemoration on Wednesday, April 26 at 7:00 p.m.  Our commemoration will be held in the Dugan-Gorges Center, Newman University, 3100 W. McCormick St, Wichita, Kansas.

Survivor Rachel Goldman Miller is our guest speaker. In 1942, nine-year-old Rachel was sent into hiding outside of Paris. Rachel never saw her family again.  In Auschwitz Ms. Miller lost 93 family members.  "I tell my story," she says, "It keeps my family alive."

The service will include readings and musical performances.  Works to be performed are Sonata for Two Violins by Mordecai Seter, "The Butterfly" from I Never Saw Another Butterfly: A Musical Memorial by Charles Davidson, and "We Know Every Child Here" from Brundibar by Hans Krasa.  Performances will be by musicians Laura Hammes Black, Lauren Betts, Becky Schmidt, Martiya Schmidt, and Sarah Chocron.

For more information contact the Mid-Kansas Jewish Federation at (316) 686-4741.


Sunday, February 15, 2015

Concert and lecture featuring works from Terezin
Music of a Holocaust Ghetto: Works from
the Terezin Ghetto

Tuesday, March 24, 2015 @ 7:00 p.m.
the Hebrew Congregation Wichita, 1850 N. Woodlawn

Featuring works by Gideon Klein, Ilse Weber, and Pavel Haas
performed by Laura Hammes Black, Joan Pfaff, Yecheskel Francis,
Susan Mayo, and Liz Tiede

Nancy Trier-Metzger, director of The Terezin Composers Project Foundation and Master of Liberal Arts candidate at Wichita State, will present a brief lecture about the history of the Theresienstadt/Terezin Ghetto in Czechoslovakia during the Holocaust and some of the composers imprisoned there.  A performance of three works by these composers will follow the lecture.

During World War II, Nazi Germany occupied Czechoslovakia and transformed the garrison town of Terezin, which they renamed Theresienstadt, into a transit camp for Czech Jews.  From there the prisoners were deported to other ghettos and camps, most often Auschwitz. Theresienstadt was unique among the Nazi camp system because of the unusually high number of artists, musicians, actors, writers, and other members of the Czech arts community deported there, yet it was a significant component of the Nazis' "Final Solution to the Jewish Question."

For more information, email
terezincomposers@gmail.com

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Justice and Memory After the Holocaust

An important Holocaust conference that promises to be interesting and informative will be held on November 17, 2013 in Overland Park, Kansas at the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education.  The MCHE and the Holocaust Education Academic Roundtable (HEART) present Justice and Memory After the Holocaust, an interdisciplinary conference for faculty and graduate students (the conference is from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.)

If you are in driving distance to Overland Park, I highly recommend attending.  There are two hotels nearby.  Specific information is included on the MCHE website here.  

Sessions include: Art after the Holocaust, Gender and Gendering in Holocaust Films, Music after the Holocaust, The Holocaust and Contemporary Genocides, the Nuremberg Trials, and several other sessions on various topics.  Dr. Gabriel Finder of the University of Virginia will be the featured speaker. He will speak at a session in the morning, and in the afternoon he will  introduce the Yiddish-language film Undzere Kinder (Our Children).  The film portrays two child survivors of the Holocaust in postwar Lodz who live in an orphanage and encounter two Jewish comedians who spent the war in the USSR.  Dr. Finder will also lead a discussion following the film.

For more information, contact Fran Sternberg at frans@mchekc.org or call her at 913-327-8194.

NOTE: Student groups of five or more (undergraduate or graduate) receive a discounted rate of $30 per student. Professors, check with the MCHE for more details.

JUSTICE AND MEMORYAFTER THE HOLOCAUST


Sunday, November 17, 2013
8:30 am - 4:30 pm
Registration begins at 8:15

Jewish Community Campus
5801 West 115th Street
Overland Park, KS  66211

Presented by:
Midwest Center for Holocaust Education
Holocaust Education Academic Roundtable

PROGRAM

The conference will explore responses to and remembrance and representation of the Holocaust from the immediate postwar period to the present. 

 for a listing of plenary sessions and facilitated workshops. For more information contact Fran Sternberg, Director of University Programs and Adult Education, at frans@mchekc.org or 913-327-8194.

REGISTRATION

DEADLINE: October 28, 2013
Due to limited space, registrations received after that date will be honored as space permits. Cancellations received prior to two weeks before the conference will be reimbursed in full. 

REGISTRATION FEES: 
University Faculty - $60 
Graduate Students - $40
Fees include conference materials, light breakfast and light refreshments. 


Thursday, April 25, 2013

The Cat with the Yellow Star: Coming of Age in a Holocaust Ghetto

Ela Stein was eleven years old when she was deported to the Terezin concentration camp with her mother, sister, grandmother, and uncle.  Only a few hundred of the 15,000 children who passed through Terezin, a collecting point for Jews who were later transported to other camps (usually Auschwitz) were alive at the end of WWII; Ela and her sister were among the children who survived. While at Terezin, Ela performed one of the leading roles ("Cat") in Hans Krasa's children's opera, Brundibar.  As this opera and the history of Terezin has become known in recent years, Ela (Stein) Weissberger has traveled both throughout the United States and abroad to recount to audiences her experiences as a child during the Holocaust.

Ela will be the honored guest speaker at the Wichita Holocaust Commemoration service on Thursday, May 2; the service begins at 7:00 p.m. and will be held in the Dugan-Gorges Conference Center at Newman University (3100 McCormick St.).  Works by composers who were also interned at Terezin will be performed by members of the Wichita Symphony.  Musical compositions included in the service are:
the duo for violin and cello by Gideon Klein (1919-1945); String trio (Dance) by Hans Krasa (1899-1944); and Wiegala (Lullaby) by Ilse Weber (1903-1944).

Terezin was both a unique concentration camp/ghetto and yet it was not.  Those deported there suffered deprivation, extremely poor hygienic conditions, hunger and even starvation, infestation by lice and bedbugs, disease and exhaustion.  Although not a death camp but a collecting point (later called a ghetto) for Jews to be transported on to other camps, many inmates died in Terezin.  Indeed, former Terezin prisoner Ivan Klima writes in "A Childhood in Terezin" (Granta, vol. 44, p. 203):
Hunger, and an enforced sojourn in an enclosed and closely guarded space, certainly made my childhood different from the childhood of my contemporaries, but what distinguished it most of all was the constant presence of death.  People died in the room in which I lived. They died by the dozen.
Yet, Terezin was unique in that it had a vibrant cultural life.  Many of these cultural events--plays, recitations, concerts, lectures--were secretly performed in the attics of barracks. Later, the Nazis permitted these activities and even allowed the Jews to operate an organization, the Leisure Time Activity Organization, to oversee cultural performances.  Additionally, the care and education of children was of high priority for the Jewish community.  Although traditional education was forbidden (yet children were taught in secret),  children were permitted to learn arts, crafts and music.  In a phone interview (April 22, 2013), Ela related how the young (and handsome) composer Gideon Klein often came to Room 28, the room in which Ela and other girls her age were housed, to teach them music and Hebrew songs.

By 1943, numerous chamber concerts, solo recitals, operas and other musical events were being held in Terezin.  It was during this summer that rehearsals began for Hans Krasa's children's opera, Brundibar (The Bumblebee).  Krasa wrote the opera in 1938; it was first performed in a Jewish boys' orphanage in Prague (again, in secret as Jews were subjected to numerous restrictions by that time).  The original director, much of the original cast and Krasa were now in Terezin.  Ela and many other children had the opportunity to forget about the horrors of ghetto life during the evening rehearsals.  As Ela stated, they did not have to wear the yellow star during performances.  The children could experience a sense of freedom as they performed a story in which good overcomes evil.  Melissa Mueller explains in her book A Garden of Eden in Hell (pp. 158-159) about the pianist Alice Herz Sommer, also a Terezin survivor, that
It was a story pregnant with symbolism, and the infectious enthusiasm of children singing and dancing, and the alluring playing of the orchestra, were balm to the souls of thousands of prisoners. The final chorus became a sort of secret hymn.  
Come let's beat the drum/Victory is ours.../Because we will not let them defeat us,/Because they will not, cannot frighten us.
As questions were being raised by the international community, in particular the International Red Cross, regarding the treatment of Jews and the existance of concentration camps, the Nazis saw an opportunity to use Terezin to their advantage.  They began a project of beautification of the ghetto, painting building facades, planting flowers and gardens, building a gazebo in the town square; in short, creating what former prisoner Zedenka Fantlova in her book, The Tin Ring: How I Cheated Death called the Potemkin village facade (p. 120). Yet it was the Jews who were required to create this propaganda tool.  In his diary written at Terezin before he died in Auschwitz in 1944, Philipp Manes wrote
Is the town beautification being done for us, is so much beauty being created for Jews? Is Theresienstadt being planted, dug, and built as though we are to have a beloved home here--forever? . . .After it is all completed, will we have to vacate Theresienstadt . . .?We discuss these questions passionately in the evenings, and none of us know any answers.
(from As if it were Life: A WWII Diary from the Theresienstadt Ghetto, p. 154)

When all was ready, representatives from the Danish Red Cross and the International Red Cross visited the ghetto.  In addition to a strictly guided tour, the visitors were entertained by concerts, including a performance of Brundibar.  After the delegation's visit and satisfactory report, filming began for a propaganda movie that also included a performance of Krasa's opera.  In fact, the photo included in a previous post on this blog is a still taken from the film Hitler's Gift to the Jews (segments of this film can be viewed on YouTube).

Brundibar was performed 55 times.  Unfortunately, many of the children perished during the Holocaust.  Krasa himself died just after his arrival at Auschwitz in October 1944.  The story of music creating beauty and happiness, if only for a short time, for children who were suffering harsh imprisonment has resonated with many people, as several recent performances of Brundibar demonstrate.  Yet we cannot forget the unimaginable torment endured by those children and all the victims and survivors of the Holocaust.  The real lesson of Terezin, the lesson Holocaust survivors speak of, is that it must never happen again.  We must be vigilant, we must speak up when we see injustice, we must not tolerate intolerance.  Ivan Klima wrote in "A Childhood in Terezin" (p. 207)
The only hope for the salvation of the world in our time is tolerance. . . Tolerance must never mean tolerance of intolerance, tolerance of those who are prepared to limit the freedom or even the right to life, of anyone else, . . 
The Wichita Yom HaShoah is sponsored by the Mid-Kansas Jewish Federation, Newman University, Wichita State University, Inter-Faith Ministries, Congregation Emanu-El, and Ahavath Achim Hebrew Congregation.






Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Hitler's Children

I recently viewed an excellent documentary film at the Tallgrass Film Festival, a superb film festival that was created ten years ago.  Although this film is not directly connected to Theresienstadt, I am including a short trailer about it because it deals with an aspect of the Holocaust that has not been closely examined.

The filmmaker Chanoch Ze'evi has interviewed several descendants of several highly prominent Nazi officials.  Hitler himself did not have children; these people, however, are children or grandchildren of Nazi notables such as Heinrich Himmler, Amon Goeth, Hermann Goering,  Rudolph Hoess, and Hans Frank.  The difficulty of having to confront such a legacy is examined by each of the descendants.  I found the film both powerful and yet emotionally demanding.  The insight offered by each of the interviewees are another important aspect of Holocaust study worth investigation.  Should you have an opportunity to see this film, I highly recommend you do so.

Trailer for Hitler's Children (from the website of the Tallgrass Film Association)


Monday, October 22, 2012

The cast of the children's opera Brundibar by Hans Krasa.  The opera was performed 55 times in Theresienstadt.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

A brief history of the Theresienstadt ghetto



In October 1938 Adolf Hitler was given permission with the conclusion of the Munich Conference to annex the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia.  Despite his assurances that he would not seek to invade or otherwise obtain more of the Czech lands, the German army did so in March 1939.  Czechoslovakia ceased to exist and the Czech lands were incorporated into the Third Reich as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.  On Oct. 10, 1941, the Reich Protector, Reinhard Heydrich, held a meeting in Prague to discuss the “Solution to the Jewish Question” as it related to the Protectorate.  He announced that the garrison town of Theresienstadt, built in 1780 by the Emperor Franz Joseph II, would be utilized as a temporary “collecting point” for the Jews of Prague and all of Bohemia and Moravia.  Although the implementation of ghettoization was discussed, Heydrich made clear that the ultimate purpose of Theresienstadt was to provide a transit camp from which Jews, already “greatly decimated”, would be sent to the “East”.  Following their evacuation, Theresienstadt could then become an exemplary German settlement.  Indeed, the creation of the Theresienstadt ghetto was ultimately part of the overall Nazi policy of waging war in order to expand the German Reich, occupying territories in order to obtain “Lebensraum” (living space), and destroying European Jewry to make the Reich “Judenfrei”.

Initially all prisoners had to give up many personal belongings when they entered the ghetto: medications, toothpaste, soap, food.  This would have also included music and most musical instruments.  Furthermore, a town that had previously held 7,000 inhabitants was now divided, with less than half of that area used for the prisoners whose numbers reached nearly 60,000.  The daily life of the prisoners was unbelievably cruel due to overcrowding, hunger, disease, poor sanitation, irrational and arbitrary regulations and punishments.  Nevertheless, an active cultural life secretly developed with lectures, plays and concerts held in basements and attics.  Among the Jews imprisoned there were numerous artists, writers, composers, actors, and musicians.  Soloists gave recitals, performing from memory. Later, chamber groups and even orchestras were formed, along with choruses and enough vocalists to perform operas.  Although children were not permitted a formal education, they were permitted to receive instruction in arts, crafts and music.  Composers were later able to continue their craft when the Nazis permitted artistic activity by establishing the Leisure Time Activity Administration; performances of works in the standard repertoire were given along with new works composed in Theresienstadt.  


The Nazis eventually realized that they could exploit the cultural events of Theresienstadt.  Due to the increasing questions from the International Red Cross regarding the treatment of the Jews, they decided to create a Potemkin Village, as survivor Zdenka Fantlova termed it.  Theresienstadt would serve as a propaganda tool and “beautification” of the ghetto began in the spring of 1944.  Elderly and sick inmates were deported to decrease the population, prisoners were given new clothes, facades of buildings were painted, gardens planted.  Representatives of the International Red Cross were invited to visit the town Hitler gave to the Jews (as a documentary that was made following this visit was called).  The visitors saw children playing, receiving food and candy, a soccer match with a well-timed goal and the cheers of the crowd, musical performances, stores with goods, a bank, and a bakery with freshly baked bread.  Although the subsequent documentary appears never to have been shown, the visitors came away from their visit with favorable impressions.  They would report that the Jews were treated well; indeed, the propaganda tool had been a success. 


Approximately 144,000 people passed through Theresienstadt.  An estimated 33,000 died of starvation, disease, exhaustion and even suicide while in the ghetto.   Many others were deported, usually to Auschwitz.  Some died while in transit, others were gassed immediately upon arrival or died later in Auschwitz or another death camp.  Roughly 21,000 prisoners survived.  Of the 15,000 children who were sent to Theresienstadt, around 500 survived.