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Terezin Remembered: Lecture | Burlington

Date: 04.27.2010
Time: 8:00 p.m.
Location: Waterman Building, UVM, Burlington

Terezin Remembered: Lecture
Tuesday, April 27, 2010, 8:00 p.m.
UVM, Waterman Memorial Lounge (Room 338)

"Holding on to Humanity: The Terezín Performance of Verdi's Requiem and its Place in Postwar Memory"

Given by Anna Hájková from the University of Toronto, and sponsored by the Center for Holocaust Studies at UVM

Between 1943 and 1944, several hundred inmates of the World War II Jewish ghetto at Terezín gathered regularly in the basement of one of the barracks to rehearse Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem. The oratorio had to be rehearsed again and again because frequent transports to Auschwitz carried away many of the singers. Only a handful of the musicians lived to see the liberation. The rendition was both controversial and celebrated in its time: inmates questioned the decision to perform an oratorio which was a Catholic mass for the dead in a Jewish ghetto. At the same time, however, the prisoners were aware that even among the rich Terezín cultural offerings, the Requiem was magnificent, musically and as a public statement. In performing the Requiem, inmates shipped to the ghetto from all over Europe refused to accept the Nazi-imposed status of racial inferiority and declared their connectedness to European culture and humanist values.

Anna Hájková is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Toronto. She received her MA in history from Humboldt-University in Berlin in 2006. In her dissertation, she analyzes the social history of the Terezín ghetto. From 2006 to 2009, she was the editor of the Prague Terezín Initiative Institute’s yearbook, Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente. She is also a member of the board of trustees of the Ravensbrück Memorial summer school. She has published on various aspects of the Terezín ghetto, the Holocaust in the Netherlands, and the Czechoslovak 1960s liberalisation process’ impact on the association of concentration camp survivors.


VIEW THE COMPLETE "TEREZIN REMEMBERED" SCHEDULE.

Watch this video segment on Terezin featuring Susi Learmonth, a member of the VSO Friends of the Upper Valley, whose family was incarcerated in the concentration camp during the Holocaust.


This event is part of "Terezin Remembered" which is supported by:

The Late Andre and Nussia Aisenstadt

The Automaster
Dinse, Knapp & McAndrew, P.C.
Northeast Delta Dental
Westaff

Vermont Humanities Council

L. Diana Carlisle and Jim Inman
Frank and Ducky Donath
Bruce Lisman
Pat Robins and Lisa Schamberg

Anonymous
Tricia Passmore Alley
Al and Gretchen Besser
Chittenden Wealth Management
Ed and Nancy Colodny
Cabot Creamery Cooperative
Michael and Margaret Galbraith
Jewish Community of Greater Stowe
Susi Learmonth
Deb and Paul Markowitz
National Life Group
Sylvia Robison
David and Edna Silver
SymQuest Group
WCAX-TV Channel 3/Peter Martin

In honor of Diana Carlisle: Elisabeth A. Bossi, Ann Geer, June Heins, Susan Rech and Marc Sarnow, Christine and Rolf Sellge

Special thanks to the UVM Center for Holocaust Studies, St. Michael's College, and the Firehouse Center for the Visual Arts.