Word: terezin
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Perversely, music played an important role in the Nazi concentration camps. Loudspeakers blared Schubert, Wagner and march music, while, less officially, prisoners smuggled in instruments and put on private musicales. In "model" camps such as Theresienstadt (Terezin) in Bohemia, the inmates were even encouraged to perform for visiting Red Cross workers to show that they were being treated humanely. The late French composer Olivier Messiaen wrote one of this century's most illuminating chamber works, the Quartet for the End of Time, while incarcerated in a Silesian camp. Messiaen survived. But for most victims time was something that indeed came...
Alfred Kantor, now 48, works as an artist in a New York advertising agency. In 1939, because he was a Jew in Nazi-occupied Prague, he had to leave art school. In 1941, at age 18, he was sent to Terezin, a camp the Nazis used as a staging point for deadlier installations like Auschwitz. Kantor went there too, in 1943, but was saved from death because he was still strong enough to be drafted for work at a camp that provided laborers for a synthetic-fuel factory. In a brief introductory narrative, Kantor explains all this, and outlines what...
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