Long before the advent of fake news and weaponization of misinformation, there was The Führer Gives a City to the Jews, a Nazi propaganda film of monstrous proportions. Filmed in Terezín, a garrison town 60 kilometers north of Prague converted to an internment camp, it purported to show the happy lives of captive Jews – shoeing horses, making handbags and pottery, gardening, playing football, attending lectures and concerts, spending leisurely afternoons basking in the sunshine.
It was all an elaborate hoax, masking horrific living conditions that killed an estimated 33,000 people. Another 88,000 were sent on to extermination camps, including 15,000 children. But the ruse was so successful in deceiving Red Cross inspectors who toured Terezín in June 1944 that the Nazis decided to turn it into a pseudo-documentary, using an interred director and hundreds of inmates who were shipped to Auschwitz after filming was completed.
Still, the film got one thing right: the music. The performances of the children’s opera Brundibár and Pavel Haas’s Study for String Orchestra were absolutely authentic, a reflection of a thriving cultural life at Terezín. Under impossible conditions, music of every stripe was composed, rehearsed and performed, often led by two notable Czech conductors: Rafael Schächter and Karel Ančerl. And along with Haas, the roster of imprisoned composers included Hans Krása (who wrote Brundibár), Viktor Ullmann and Gideon Klein.
Overlooked for a long time, the Terezín composers have in recent years risen to posthumous prominence. But the term “Terezín composers” is actually a bit of a misnomer; Ullmann, Haas and Krása all had well-established careers as composers before they were sent to the camp. And the focus on them tends to obscure the larger picture of a community that embraced culture as a source of hope and means of survival. Concerts, operas, theater productions and cabaret performances offered more than temporary escape from a terrible reality. They were acts of defiance, symbols of liberation amid unrelenting oppression, an affirmation of life in a place where every day might be one’s last. As Ullmann wrote in his diary, “Our endeavor with respect to the arts was commensurate with our will to live.”
Unique among the concentration camps, Terezín (or Theresienstadt, as it was originally called) was built in the 1780s by Habsburg Emperor Joseph II as a bulwark against an expected Prussian invasion. Used as a prison by the Gestapo at the start of World War 2, the walled fortress made an ideal holding facility when the Nazis began rounding up Jews in large numbers. Between the first transport in November 1941 and the camp’s liberation in May 1945, an estimated 150,000 people passed through Terezín, mostly Jews from Czechoslovakia, Germany and Austria, then later Denmark and the Netherlands.
Living conditions were squalid. Most inmates were housed in overcrowded barracks where bare wooden bunks were stacked on top of one another; the less fortunate slept in basements and corridors. Disease was rampant, medical care was minimal, and there was never enough to eat. Everyone, even children, had to wear the yellow “Jude” star on their chest, though to a surprising extent the inmates were allowed to administer their own affairs. There was even a Council of Elders whose duties included the awful task of compiling the lists of deportees who would be “going to the East” every day, never to return.
Before the horrors of Terezín were known, some of the younger Jewish children actually looked forward to going. Life in the cities, with its onerous restrictions, constant harassment and frequent relocations, had become so unbearable that a camp in the countryside sounded appealing. Czech writer Ivan Klíma, whose A Childhood in Terezín chronicled four years there, talked about the freedom of not having to go to school, and spending playtime with his friends happily hauling heavy bricks up to first-floor windows and dropping them on the scurrying rats below.
In one of the many perverse ironies of Terezín, adults also enjoyed a newfound sense of freedom. After the Nazis took over the government of Bohemia and Moravia, the Jewish population were barred from going to concerts, theaters or music clubs. For many, the live performances in Terezín were the first they had heard in years. And not only could they attend – they could create. With no jobs or other day-to-day responsibilities, there was suddenly a lot of free time to fill.
The inmates turned to culture not out of desperation, but by inclination. The massive internment had swept up large numbers of musicians, actors, directors, set and costume designers, artists and artisans. Many continued the work they had been doing in civilian life. Indeed, it’s no surprise that Terezín’s artistic community left the legacy they did, given the sheer amount of talent in such a concentrated space.
The music did not come easy. Forbidden to bring instruments, musicians at first had to struggle by on what they could smuggle in or find. Rafael Schächter cobbled together a production of The Bartered Bride using a legless piano propped up on chairs. But once the Nazis saw that entertainment could be a useful diversion – and propaganda tool – performances were encouraged, even sometimes of the “degenerate art” that had been banned in occupied countries. Along with classical music and operas, concerts in Terezín offered Jewish music, cabaret songs and jazz.
If the performances documented by The Führer give an accurate indication, the circumstances did not affect the quality of the music. Presiding over a string ensemble, Ančerl’s treatment of Haas’s Study is impeccable. A young audience is held spellbound by the singing in Brundibár. And with an amateur choir and single score, Schächter created a performance of Verdi’s Requiem so impressive that it was the centerpiece of the Red Cross tour of the camp. Among the German dignitaries in the audience was extermination mastermind Adolf Eichmann, who reportedly said afterward, “Those crazy Jews, singing their own requiem.”
How much was lost not only in Terezín, but throughout Central Europe, has recently been brought to vivid life by Musica non grata, a joint Czech-German project that has showcased work by composers persecuted by the Nazis or otherwise oppressed for political and racial reasons. Based at the State Opera in Prague, it staged operas and operettas by Ullmann, Krása and contemporaries like Alexander Zemlinsky, Kurt Weill, Erwin Schulhoff and Paul Abraham. The invention in their work was remarkable, a visionary blending of classical structures with popular song, jazz, electronic sounds and other modern influences that still sound fresh and innovative today.
The four-year program was capped by a weekend that opened with a trip to Terezín. It is an eerily tranquil place now. Mothers push baby strollers down the sidewalks, bicyclists glide past, a chic glass-walled restaurant overlooks a sunny golf course. Memorials abound, but the central square is serenely quiet, with only signs mapping historic sites and the stately Ghetto Museum (formerly a school) invoking the nightmares of the past.
Many of the buildings have been repurposed, like a Sokol Hall where parts of The Führer were shot and the film was screened, which has been returned to its original recreational use. Others remain unchanged, in particular an ornate room in the Town Hall where performances were staged, including the premiere of the Schächter-led Requiem. Occasionally there are grim reminders of the past, such as the dimly lit rooms with dirt floors and bare concrete walls in the basement of a nondescript building that were used as a rehearsal space.
Exhibition rooms in the Magdeburg Barracks portray an active cultural life, with music scores, schedules and programs showing Ullmann, Klein, Haas and Krása busy not just composing, but organizing concerts, performing, even writing reviews. Colorful costume designs and posters attest to the popularity of operas, which included staples like Carmen and rarities like Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona. A production of Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis made it as far as dress rehearsal before the SS realized it was a satire on Hitler and shut it down.
The aphorism “Art Against Death” opens a collection of drawings and paintings that dwarfs the music memorabilia. Artists, many of whom came directly from the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, were forced to make illustrations and charts for official camp records, and handsome renderings of camp buildings and living conditions for propaganda purposes. In their spare time, they drew striking portraits of fellow inmates and sketches depicting real daily life in the camp, many of which were hidden and retrieved after liberation.
Much of the voluminous paper record is still being processed, stored in a climate-controlled room or in plastic sleeves in large bound volumes. Beyond the patience and skill evident in the manuscripts and artwork, there is a powerful sense of resilience, a light-hearted spirit in vibrant caricatures of singers and costume designs that retain their bright colors. There are even occasional hints of humor. On one page of rough sketches, several lines of text read, “Kul-tur/Kul-tus/Ku-klux-klan.” “Wordplay,” a curator assured. “No political meaning, just a joke.”
Musica non grata turned out to be a diplomatic as well as an artistic success. At a roundtable discussion, German Ambassador Andreas Künne talked about the necessity to “confront the dark chapters of our past” and Prague as an ideal “cultural crossroads” to do that. Before a double-bill that evening of Paul Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna and Zemlinsky’s Eine Florentinische Tragödie, German and Czech culture officials took the stage to wax enthusiastically about the spirit of cooperation the project had forged, amid hearty rounds of handshakes and backslapping. And when German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited Prague a few weeks later, he made a point of stopping by the State Opera to talk with the Musica non grata organizers.
Musically, it was revelatory. Audacious subject matter (a blasphemous nun, murder for love) and dazzling orchestration offered a final reminder of what had been lost – and found at Terezín, where art and music promised hope, and captured memories of a better life. As one survivor said, “We imagined we lived in a normal time – until we left.”