Zdenka's Terezín

Two weeks ago I went to 92nd Street Y and saw the documentary film, The Music of Terezín, which had its first public screening in North America. It was made in 1992 and shown on the BBC the following year. Simon Broughton, a British TV director, has a special interest in world music, and made documentaries on famous composers as well as Fado and the Sufi music. The story of the concentration camp is well known; the Gestapo made into a ghetto the fortified garrison town at Terezín (then known as Theresienstadt) where Jews from Czechoslovakia and surrounding areas were brought in to live before they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Broughton’s film portrays the creative life of composers and performers who continued to produce music under the horrendous living conditions that could only be described as subhuman. Yet, the musicians smuggled instruments, often in parts to be assembled in the camp and performed the music the composers wrote, at first in secrecy but later more openly as the Nazi supervision changed its tune. It was a beautifully crafted film, lucid and informative in its narrative, supported with interviews with surviving witnesses. Most of the interviewees have passed away since 1993. One of them, a Czech actress Zdenka Fantlová, accompanied the director who conducted a discussion after the film.

At 88 or 89, Fantlová was still beautiful, articulate, and high-spirited. She confirmed that neither she nor anyone else knew where the “train to the East” went. But in 1944 she was on the very last transport train to Auschwitz together with most of the musicians who eventually perished there. On arriving at Auschwitz, she managed, by falsifying her age, to be sorted to the group destined to the labor camp rather than the gas chamber, and survived. She told the audience emphatically that although the life was miserable in the camp, instead of dwelling on it, she learned a valuable lesson how to live the precious life fully day to day. Her words struck a chord in me, as I, too, lived the war years, certainly less horrendous but equally terrifying and deprived. In 2001 she wrote an account of her life during the war entitled My Lucky Star (after a Fred Astaire song), originally written in Czech in 1997. Then, in 2010 she had it updated and republished as The Tin Ring. I bought a copy, had it autographed by the author, chatted with her, and shook her hand. It was for me a terribly emotional, intensely moving experience.

I asked Broughton why the documentary slept all these 19 years, and he said that there was no interest. I did not have time to pursue the question. But I speculated that in these intervening years, the audience demanded and expected that the films that dealt with concentration camps focused on the horrors of the Holocaust and presumably found one that portrayed music-making at Terezín, even under the adverse condition, insufferably frivolous. Some may even have seen it as a gentle denial of the truth of the Holocaust, aligning it with the heavily-faked Nazi propaganda film showcasing Terezín for the Dutch Red Cross as a happy internment town. There were questions from the floor, in fact, asking to give (for the benefit of the audience) more details about the miseries in the camp life. Only in recent years, the works of the Terzín composers came to be recorded and publicly performed -- Viktor Ullman, Pavel Haas, Giedion Klein, and Hans Krása, among them, some of them students of Schönberg and contemporaries of Janacek. Time may be finally ripe for a larger audience appreciating the film that extols the courage, strength, and irrepressible creativity of those musicians (and actors and artists, too) of Terezín -- Zdenka’s Terezín.

The film The Music of Terezín was discussed at some length in The Observer/The Guardian at the time it was shown in England in 2010. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/13/terezin-ghetto-jews-holocaust-vulliamy.