Word: theresienstadt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...included 10 Old Masters and several other Impressionist canvases, was sent to France for safekeeping, only to be seized there by the Nazis. When Germany invaded the Low Countries, Gutmann and his wife Louise were taken away. She later died at Auschwitz. He was beaten to death in the Theresienstadt concentration camp after refusing to transfer assets to his captors...
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...
...Wulzburg camp; Vitezslava Kapralova, a Czech-born pianist and conducting student of Charles Munch, who, only 25, perished in 1940 of tuberculosis while attempting to get to America; and Gideon Klein, another Czech composer, who died in 1945 at the age of 25 after trips to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Furstengrubbe...
Klein completed the first movement of his Duo for Violin and Cello in November 1941, a month before he was sent to Theresienstadt. There he took part in the camp's Potemkin-village cultural scene, writing in a camp publication that "people who never lived here will look at the number of musical events here with wonder and amazement." He never finished the second movement: two minutes and 35 seconds into the lento, the music is cut off in mid-measure, mute testimony to catastrophe, as eloquent as any note ever written...
...Germany before the war form a minority of the 28,000 who make the Federal Republic their home. One of them is Alfred Moses, 70, a semi- retired West Berlin watchmaker who left Europe for Israel in late 1948 after living through the horror of the concentration camps of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Finding life in the Middle East intolerable, he and his wife Inge returned to Germany in 1954. In Berlin the couple's friends are all Christians. Says Inge: "We do not go to synagogue, and there are few Jews, if any, in our neighborhood." She adds...