This radio feature illuminates the strange place that was described by one writer as ‘a surrealistic world on the edge of life’. It uses archival material, interviews and music to focus on the concentration camp, Theresienstadt, and the life lived there.
It is also a personal journey for radio producer Cathy Peters, whose grandparents and other family members were incarcerated there from 1942 to 1945.
Theresienstadt was a forced labour camp and ghetto for some 140,000 Jews during the years 1941-1945. Virtually the whole Czech Jewish population was sent to this former barracks town, some 60 kilometres from Prague. The other largest group came from Germany – German Jews who were in some way notable and thus afforded a brief period in this so-called model ghetto, before further transportation to the death camps in the east, primarily Auschwitz.
Among them were war veterans, intellectuals, musicians or artists who were given a degree of freedom after work to practise their art or to give talks. And so there developed in this camp a remarkable cultural life that was eventually co-opted by the Nazis for propaganda purposes. There are records of some 2,500 lecture/talks that were given in Theresienstadt and a wealth of music, poetry and visual art has survived as testimony to the spirit of those who produced it under the most barbaric conditions.
The Kaddish heard throughout the program was sung as a prayer for the dead by a former Theresienstadt inmate in Terezin. In the same spirit, this program is a Kaddish in memory of those who were forced to live and die there.
With Konrad Kwiet, Edith Sheldon, Jan Munk, Museum Director, Terezin
Location recordings and interviews in Terezin by Lenka Svobodova, Czech Radio
Translations and readings by Eric Baker.
Music excerpts from Gideon Klein’s Piano Sonata and String Trio, from Brundibar by Hans Krasa and original music/sound design by Cathy Peters.
Written and presented by Cathy Peters. Production by Cathy Peters and John Jacobs
https://soundcloud.com/cathypeters/theresienstadt
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