Composers
As the murderous frenzy of the Holocaust exploded in the ghettos and concentration camps, composers and musicians imprisoned there refused to be stilled. On scraps of paper they penciled their inspirations and played their songs, praying that even if they died, their music would survive.
Pavel Haas | (1899-1944)
A prolific, multi-faceted composer whose works ranged from opera to symphonies to film and theatre scores, Haas, a Czech-Jew, was deported to the Terezín ghetto-labor camp in 1941. While imprisoned there, he composed 8 pieces, including perhaps his best-known work, Study for Strings. The Nazi’s used a performance of this work in a propaganda film designed to show Terezín as a model, benign camp; once the film was completed, Haas and 18,000 other prisoners were sent to Auschwitz, where they were killed. | Biography
Gideon Klein | (1919-1945)
Throughout his short life, composer Gideon Klein’s career was impacted by the Holocaust and other acts of anti-Semitism. His university schooling was stopped in 1940 when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia and banned higher education. Soon after, Klein couldn’t accept a London Royal Academy of Music scholarship because the UK refused to grant visas to most Jews. Klein was then deported to the Terezín ghetto-labor camp in 1941. Despite all these obstacles, Klein established himself in Terezín as both a composer and pianist; he wrote several notable string pieces and a piano sonata. His compositions exist today because he gave his manuscripts to a girlfriend who survived Terezín; Klein was murdered during the war’s last days in an Auschwitz subcamp. | Biography
Rafael Schachter | (1905-1945)
The Romanian-Jewish Schächter came to prominence in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s after studying at the Prague Conservatory. A noted composer, conductor, and pianist, he was deported to the Terezín ghetto-labor camp in 1941. He became a central organizer of musical life while in Terezín, including creating a choir of more than 200 men and women. In a direct act of resistance, he had the choir perform Verdi’s Requiem 16 times, which included Latin words that promised God’s retribution for all those who had been harmed. “They could sing (to the Nazis) what they could not say,” remarked Washington, DC Maestro Murry Sidlin, who created a concert-drama performance series, Defiant Requiem, memorializing Schächter’s efforts. Schächter, who was later transported to Auschwitz, died on a death march in 1945. | Biography
Viktor Ullmann | (1898-1944)
A highly-regarded, prolific composer, Viktor Ullmann had written 41 opuses and three piano sonatas at the time of his deportation to the Terezín ghetto-labor camp in 1942 (though his Austro-Hungarian, Jewish-born parents converted to Catholicism before Ullmann’s birth, his status as an assimilated Jew afforded him little protection from the Nazis). Ullmann was undaunted by his imprisonment and continued to work; he is quoted as saying of he and his fellow Jewish composers at Terezin, “By no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon. Our endeavor with respect to arts was commensurate with our will to live.” While in Terezín, Ullmann reportedly composed 20 works. He was murdered 2 days after being transported to Auschwitz in October, 1944. | Biography
