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| Operatic Lesson; in our morning paper | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Aug 2 2006, 08:10 AM (105 Views) | |
| DivaDeb | Aug 2 2006, 08:10 AM Post #1 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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I copied the article because I think you have to register to read stuff on the Star website Holocaust survivor uses opera to teach a lesson of tolerance “I want to make sure that this should never happen to children again,” she says. By PAUL HORSLEY The Kansas City Star Ela Stein Weissberger will never forget the drumbeats. As she and her family cowered in the attic of their home, they heard the mob approaching, heralded by the drumming of the Hitler Youth. It was November 1938, Weissberger was 8, and Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” had reached her small Czech town of Lom u Mostu near Prague. By morning all the windows were smashed and “Jews Get Out!” was scrawled over all the buildings. “I still sometimes have a crazy dream about the drums,” said Weissberger, 76. She was in Kansas City this week to help prepare children at the Lyric Opera’s summer camp to sing the children’s opera “Brundibár,” which they will perform at Rockhurst University in February. Weissberger, who will return to participate in the production, was helping the Lyric’s education director, Paula Winans, coach the 10- to 18-year-olds on Czech diction. It would be hard to find a better qualified teacher. Weissberger first sang the opera as a child inmate in the Terezín concentration camp outside Prague. She has since become well known for using the opera and her experience to teach tolerance. Weissberger, her sister, mother and uncle landed at Terezín (Theresienstadt in German) on a freezing day in February 1942. She was 11. The Nazis had arrested her father the month before for speaking out against Hitler. He would die at Treblinka. Most of her extended family would not survive the Holocaust. Terezín was a bizarre high-culture work camp created by the Nazis to show the outside world that prisoners were being treated well. In reality, children were separated from their families, crammed into overcrowded barracks, and fed just enough to strengthen them for hard labor. “We lost our childhoods,” Weissberger said. “There was no one there to help us.” In the evenings, thousands of children and adults composed and performed concerts, painted and wrote poetry. But it was music that Weissberger most remembers. “The best musicians from all Europe were concentrated in Theresienstadt,” she said. Eventually they began rehearsals for “Brundibár,” which Czech composer Hans Krása had composed earlier for an orphanage and which inmate Rudi Freudenfeld smuggled into the camp. The simple story told of a brother and sister who, having come to the town square to earn money for their sick mother, are confronted by an ogre-like organ grinder, Brundibár, who is eventually conquered with the help of animals and children from the village. Weissberger auditioned and had a good enough voice for the role of the cat in the opera. She sang in all 55 performances, including one filmed by the Nazis to use as propaganda. Another was observed by Dutch Red Cross inspectors, who were duped into believing that conditions in the camp were tolerable. Nearly 100,000 inhabitants of Terezín perished, including 15,000 children. “The reason I wanted to do ‘Brundibár’ is so that we’ll never forget what happened at Terezín,” Winans told the children before the rehearsal, “so that we’ll learn to be tolerant of people who are different from us.” This week Weissberger showed the children her yellow “Judenstern,” which she had to wear at all times to mark her as a Jew. Only onstage, during performances of “Brundibár,” were they permitted to take off the star. At Terezín, after each performance of the opera the Czech-speaking audience made the performers repeat the final chorus several times. They knew what the German guards apparently didn’t fully recognize, that this was a tale about liberation from Hitler. “That minute we were happy,” Weissberger said. “We forgot where we were.” She also showed the Lyric campers a film containing excerpts of the propaganda film, “Hitler Builds the Jews a Town,” complete with a young Weissberger singing heartily in her cat face paint. During a lunch break, Lyric Opera camper Michelle Joseph, 11, of Lee’s Summit, wanted to talk one-on-one with Weissberger. “How did they kill them?” she asked of the Terezín prisoners who were then transported to death camps. “They told them they were going to take a shower,” Weissberger replied. “They got Zyklon gas instead.” But Weissberger’s message to young performers and others is not one of violence or atrocities. What kids need most, she said, is to learn acceptance, tolerance and the art of friendship. “I want to make sure that this should never happen to children again,” she told Michelle. “Children always suffer in these situations. But the color of your skin doesn’t mean anything.” Though the Feb. 8-10 Lyric performances will be in English, two of the choruses will be sung in their original Czech. In September 1944, most the children who had taken part in the opera were sent to Auschwitz. Composer Krása would later perish, too. “As you know, a very small group of us survived,” Weissberger said. “With the death of those children, I thought the opera died, too,” she said. “But that was not the case.” In 1987 there was a flurry of interest in the opera around the world, along with a wide variety of music by Terezín inhabitants Viktor Ullmann, Gideon Klein and Pavel Haas. “We are the last ones,” said Weissberger, who said she feels an urgency to tell her story. “After this generation is gone there will be no eyewitnesses.” |
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