Music from the Camps

I had known about it for years, and had even read memoirs about it. So when The New York Times announced that Alice Herz-Sommer, the oldest survivor of the Nazi camps, had died I wasn’t surprised to learn that she had been a pianist, and had been one of the lucky few whose music had saved them from the gas chambers. The Nazis, having a love of music and a need for publicity, decided to, well, not kill two birds with one stone. So they set up Theresienstadt, which would be a feeder camp for Auschwitz, and also would be a model camp featuring the best of Jewish cultural and intellectual life.

Nothing illustrates the enormous and horrifying paradox that was Nazi Germany better than their relationship with music and the Jewish musicians who played—often—the great works of German / Austrian composers. But let The Guardian tell the story:

In 1943 the Nazis struck upon two entwined ideas. One was to stage Brundibár, a children's opera composed in 1941 by Hans Krása, invite a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross to see it, and let these distinguished guests be the judges of what they saw. The children sang, the orchestra played and the Red Cross was delighted, underwriting Terezín with its international authority and a clean bill of health. Within days, almost the entire cast of children had been shipped "East" to the gas chambers.

The second scheme was to produce a documentary entitled The Führer Gives a City to the Jews, for which Terezín was cleaned up and grotesque sequences filmed in which apparently happy inmates, in reality doomed to die, play football and cultivate market gardens. And of course there is music: the Terezín Orchestra plays, under the baton of its founder and conductor, Karel Ancerl. Here, his genius is exploited for a nauseating propaganda purpose – "but he could not do otherwise," recalls Anka. But she knew him differently, for who he really was, her memories both intimate and epic.

Better, consider the story of Herz-Sommers, as The New York Times describes it:

Music spared Mrs. Herz-Sommer a similar fate. One night, after she had been in Terezin for more than a year, she was stopped by a young Nazi officer, as Ms. Stoessinger’s book recounts.

“Do not be afraid,” he said. “I only want to thank you for your concerts. They have meant much to me.”

He turned to leave before adding: “One more thing. You and your little son will not be on any deportation lists. You will stay in Theresienstadt until the war ends.”

And so Herz-Sommers had the paradoxical privilege of being allowed to live, though she had to escort her mother to the deportation center for the “East” in Prague (small wonder—she called it the worst moment of her life), and see her husband in 1944 transferred from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and then to Dachau, where he died.

Perhaps because of the music, she never turned bitter. The Times quotes her thus:

“It was propaganda,” she later said. “We had to play because the Red Cross came three times a year.”

But for Mrs. Herz-Sommer, who played more than 100 concerts in Terezín (the Czech name for Theresienstadt), the sustaining power of music was no less real.

“These concerts, the people are sitting there — old people, desolated and ill — and they came to the concerts, and this music was for them our food,” she later said. “Through making music, we were kept alive.”

“Making music” I assumed to be the act of interpreting somebody else’s music, but I was only half right. Because there was music being composed, too—and a special music it was. Because Czechoslovakia had a special, dual musical heritage. Yes, they were deeply influenced by Germany, studied there and played its music. But there had also emerged a distinctly Czech school: Smetana, Janácek, and of course Dvorak, who straddled both worlds. Here’s what The Guardian has to say:

Listening to the new Nash CD, and earlier recordings of the Terezín works by the La Roche Quartet, the Pavel Haas Quartet of Prague (Haas died in Auschwitz in 1944) and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, one gets a very strong sense that not only were great composers murdered in gas chambers, but also that a whole greater than the sum of its parts was summarily eradicated: a distinctively Czech school of music – bursting with talent, energy, innovation, yearning and wit – poised to flourish and reinvent the national music in the world of postwar modernity.

Of course it never happened, but those few composers who did survive – mostly gentiles such as Bohuslav Martinu – offered a hint of what might have been but never was, with his extraordinary blend of Bohemian romance and modern rigour. However, the saplings of that truncated Prague Spring did very briefly grow, could be heard and were heard – en route to the gas chambers.  

Thus, a whole nascent musical tradition was lost. But what had it been? How did the music from Theresienstadt sound? Tantalizing to think about, and especially so when considering the words of one particular composer, Victor Ullmann, who died in the camps in 1944. Here’s what Wikipedia had to say about him:

The particular nature of the camp at Theresienstadt enabled Ullmann to remain active musically: he was a piano accompanist, organized concerts ("Collegium musicum", "Studio for New Music"), wrote critiques of musical events, and composed, as part of a cultural circle including Karel Ančerl, Rafael Schachter, Gideon Klein, Hans Krása, and other prominent musicians imprisoned there. He wrote: "By no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon. Our endeavor with respect to arts was commensurate with our will to live."[3]

I turned, as always, to YouTube, and sure enough, it was there: the Third String Quartet, written in 1943. And how did it sound?

Well, it’s music I admire more than like. It’s also music that is tightly reasoned, well-crafted, highly serious; this composer let’s you see why one of the foremost composers of the time, Arnold Schoenberg, thought so highly of Ullmann. It’s music that refuses to sink to bathos or cheap sentiment.