Next week marks the memorial observances called Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, or in the US, Days of Remembrance. On WETA Classical’s Choral Showcase this week we offer “Music of Remembrance” with two works based on the poetry, prose, and art created by the children of Terezín (in German, Theresienstadt) between 1941 and 1944. This so-called “model ghetto” was in reality a waystation to the extermination camps in the East. 150,000 Jews were sent there, 15,000 of them children; of those children, only 150 survived. What also survived are those hundreds of drawings, poems, and pieces of art, works that bear witness and that inspired both the 1967 song-cycle I Never Saw Another Butterfly by Charles Davidson, and the oratorio Vedem by Lori Laitman. From a Czech word meaning “In the Lead,” Vedem was a clandestine magazine put together by some of the boys in Terezín, filled with original essays, poems, fiction, jokes, drawings, and commentary. One of the few contributors who survived the war and the transports buried 800 pages there; at war’s end he returned, dug them up and took them back home to Prague. In 1995 selections were compiled into a book, a rich source of material for Laitman and librettist David Mason when they put together the oratorio Vedem in 2010. I was thrilled to be able to speak with the composer about the work, the music, and the act of remembering.
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