Holocaust Center’s Kristallnacht commemoration examines last ghetto’s music
Within the struggles of the ghetto blossomed a rich cultural practice of musical performances.
Magda Spiegel was a talented Jewish opera singer in Germany, well-regarded for her ability before antisemitism led the director of her opera to fire her in 1935. Heartbroken, she withdrew from public life.
Alone in her apartment, she survived Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass,” a pogrom against Jews by Nazis on Nov. 9 to Nov. 10 in 1938.
Four years later, the Nazis deported Spiegel to the Theresienstadt transit ghetto in Terezín. There, she would join an impassioned group of 140,000 inmates who played, composed and listened to music over the 3 1/2 years of the ghetto’s existence.
The music of Theresienstadt was the center of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh’s annual commemoration of Kristallnacht where Holocaust scholar and fellow at the Frankel Institute of Advanced Judaic Studies Anna Hájková shared information on the ghetto in a conversation with historian Joshua Andy at Rodef Shalom Congregation on Nov. 10.
Hájková literally wrote the book on it: She’s the author of “The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt.” She explained that the title comes from the popular notion that the Lodz ghetto was the last existing ghetto before its liquidation in 1944, but Theresienstadt wasn’t liberated until May 1945.
Theresienstadt was designed by the Nazis, but the day-to-day administration was left to the Jews imprisoned there. The system created hierarchies of class; some prisoners, like the elderly who could not work, were at the bottom.
Hájková shared an image of well-dressed, thin Jewish prisoners seated. Because of the cameras of the time, she said, images often added a little bit of weight to people in photos.
Then, she pointed to the fact that those in the image were “the wealth of the ghetto,” asking the audience to imagine them 10 pounds thinner.
But from within the struggles of the ghetto blossomed a rich cultural practice of musical performances. Spontaneous singing in the men’s quarters became formalized men’s choirs after Prague conductor Rafael Schächter arrived in early December 1941.
In February 1942, prisoner Otto Zucker asked to form a recreation department to organize cultural activities. These activities — theater, lectures and musical events — provided a way for prisoners to spend their spare time.
The Holocaust Center event featured its own musical performance by four students from the Three Rivers Young Peoples Orchestra: Hailey Flood, Henry Keplar, Charlotte Nielsen and Maya Kashlan. The latter three went on a European trip that included a visit to Theresienstadt, which inspired the event.
After Hájková spoke of the ghetto, the students performed Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 4 and Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus.” Then, they explained the impact of their visit to the ghetto.
“I’ve been playing music my entire life, and I’ve often felt like, ‘Oh, it’s just another song,’” Keplar said. “After that experience, I kind of looked at more of what had been in my thoughts myself. ‘What did it mean to them?’ and ‘How can it mean more to me?’ And I’ve heard stories, and I’ve seen the instruments that were played in these camps, and I’ve seen the hope that was brought to these people.”
Nielsen added that experience encouraged her to continue playing with the hope that her music could have an impact on someone’s life.
“When you play music from such a young age, it becomes very routine for you. You don’t really see the meaning in it or you don’t see the impact that you could have on people,” Nielsen said. “You play through the songs. You know what you’re supposed to do. People see it more as a skill or competition, and really it’s not that at all because it’s an art form, and you can really impact people’s lives.”
The music was also a way for the Jews to distinguish themselves with the hope that it would prove themselves to be “decent Jews,” Hájková said. In the introduction to the event, Carole Zawatsky, Tree of Life’s CEO, spoke about the threat of antisemitism.
In Zawatsky’s hometown of Washington, D.C., a vandal smashed the windows of a kosher restaurant the night before the Holocaust Center’s Kristallnacht program. Earlier in the week, Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam were violently attacked in an incident that European authorities condemned as antisemitic.
Emily Loeb, the Holocaust Center’s director of programs and education, shared the story of her grandparents’ survival of the Holocaust and their decision to leave Europe.
“Throughout the 1930s, my grandparents witnessed a surge in antisemitism so insidious that they felt they needed to leave their country, community, friends, family members, everything they knew and loved, in order to have the opportunity to work, have kids and live as Jews,” Loeb said.
Hájková pointed to Loeb’s remarks when speaking of the effort to be “decent Jews” in Theresienstadt.
“We can really die ourselves, trying not to provoke the antisemitism,” Hájková said. “Antisemitism is not the problem of the Jews. It’s the problem of the antisemites.” PJC
Abigail Hakas is a freelance writer living in Pittsburgh.
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