Posted on 06/09/2006 4:14:18 PM PDT by NYer
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- A one-legged piano and a chorus was all Jewish prisoners at the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia needed to express their defiance of the Nazis.
Sixty-three years ago, Jewish prisoner and conductor Rafael Schachter gathered 150 fellow Jews in a basement at the camp to perform Giuseppe Verdi's "Requiem" for the Nazis in Latin. Throughout the piece was a plea for liberation.
The prisoners felt safe singing it because the Nazis did not get the meaning the Jewish people put behind it, said Natalie Pyle, a music student who will be a junior at The Catholic University of America in Washington in the fall.
Through the "Requiem," Schachter wanted to achieve justice for himself and other prisoners, said Pyle, who was among Catholic University students who performed in a concert May 21 to pay tribute to Schachter and his fellow Jews at the site of the former camp. Terezin is a small town 30 minutes northeast of Prague, in what is now the Czech Republic.
People from around the world gathered to witness the tribute.
Dean Murry Sidlin and music students, including Pyle, from Catholic University's Benjamin T. Rome School of Music performed "Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezin" as part of the Prague Spring Music Festival. It was the first time a school of music has performed at the festival. One hundred twenty-five students and 50 musicians from Prague and the Washington Chorus performed.
Sidlin's "Defiant Requiem" is based on why Jews performed Verdi's work in Latin at the camp, the dean said in an interview with Catholic News Service in Washington June 1.
"I called the statement that (the Jews) made 'Defiant Requiem' because in the 'Requiem' Mass ... it says, 'Judgment, day of wrath ... God will punish all those who abuse humankind' and it calls upon us to be judged and so for the Jews to sing such a powerful statement in a concentration camp to their captors is an act of defiance and ... resistance," Sidlin said.
During their rehearsals, the Jewish prisoners often said, "We sing to the Nazis what we cannot say to them," Sidlin noted.
"They couldn't say to the Nazis what they felt and how God would punish them and how barbaric and unspeakable their behavior was to mankind and to humankind ... ," Sidlin said.
In a telephone interview with CNS after returning from Terezin, Pyle, an alto in the choir, said the Nazis used Terezin as propaganda.
Terezin housed artists, who were allowed to create art, unlike prisoners at other camps, such as Auschwitz, Pyle said. SS officers, troops used to keep prisoners under control, were not allowed to come inside the camp. It was run by Jewish elders, she said.
The Nazis forced a filmmaker to make a film about Terezin, which was shown during one of the sections of the "Defiant Requiem" concert, Pyle said.
Musicians in the camp were not allowed to perform Jewish pieces, Pyle said. That is why they chose the "Requiem," which is a Mass.
Sidlin said that ever since the Catholic Church made Holocaust education an important part of Catholic education his dream was to have chorus and orchestra members from Catholic University's music school present "Defiant Requiem" at the site it was originally performed.
"I wanted to do that because I wanted a large group of mostly Catholic kids to experience singing this work of the Catholic liturgy in a place where Jews sang it; so that they would understand more than the music as a statement of liturgical worship," Sidlin said.
His wish came true after he and his students performed it two years ago at Catholic University in Washington, and Sidlin conducted it two years before that at the Oregon Symphony in Portland.
Sidlin said for both performances the music school invited Jan Munk, director of the Terezin Memorial, which resulted in the invitation. The third Sunday of every May is National Commemoration Day in the Czech Republic, and to mark it a concert is held each year, he said.
In Terezin, the concert took place in an old warehouse used by the Nazis for storage; prior to the May concert it had not been used since 1944, Sidlin said. It once was a riding academy where soldiers were taught how to fight on horseback. After the academy was abandoned, the Nazis took it over in the 1940s, he said. A theater was made in that space to have the concert.
Sidlin couldn't have pictured doing the concert anywhere else.
"I think it needed to be done where it was done originally, in the concentration camp," he said. "It's the perfect place. It's a place where great barbaric behavior was perpetrated against human beings. As far as I'm concerned, there's no better place to perform a 'Requiem' Mass that invokes love, compassion ... and divine judgment."
Sidlin added, "I thought (the concert) was very dramatic, the effect was powerful, extremely well-received and unusually quite beautiful. I was enormously proud of every one of our students."
Catholic University graduate Elizabeth Fette, a soprano and former member of the chorus, said the concert was filled with mixed emotions.
"I was sad in a way knowing what they had gone through but it was triumphant because (the Jews) survived this experience, and this experience helped them survive," Fette said.
A noble act indeed.
Ping!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.