Story
To be a Jewish composer or musician under the Third Reich’s reign of terror meant your next note could be your last. At first their works were banned and labeled degenerate, their contributions to the musical canon erased from public display.
Later, 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.
Miraculously, it has.
Musicians
Meet the people rediscovering this lost generation of music and performing it for new audiences worldwide. They’re using this music to educate, to remember, and to correct an historical injustice.
- Conductors
- James Conlon, music director of the Los Angeles Opera
- Murry Sidlin, founder of the Defiant Requiem
- Musicians
- Phillip Silver, renowned pianist and Professor of Musicology at the University of Maine
- Aron Zelkowicz, acclaimed cellist and founder of the Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival
- Music Historians
- Karen Uslin, Director of Research for The Defiant Requiem Foundation
- Bret Werb, Staff Musicologist and Recorded Sound Curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Luthiers
- Father and son Amnon and Avshalom Weinstein, creators of Violins of Hope.
