Dear Max,
I wanted you to have the letter you are holding should anything happen to me during these terrible times. Max, forgive me for not being with you every day that you needed me, every day that we needed each other. But, ah, the times we had! Sitting on riverbanks, our marching band, what shining days they were. You and me and Hans. We put on quite a show, didn’t we?
Should you come to read this, you must know that you were the most important person in my life. I wanted you safe until we could be together. How I wish I could watch you grow into the stunning man that I know you will become. Your mama would be so proud of you, Max, and I admire your courage and curiosity, your decency and spirit, everything you are. You must believe in who you are and think of who you can become, and how you can make a difference.
After the rage, after the battle, after the struggle, after the heartbreak, after the sun sets over Prague, after a thousand notes are played, listen to the music, and, Max, never forget your friends. They are part of us, who we are, all we have known, and have come to love and remember. Remember the Music Makers. They are your guardian angels.
Your Poppy
(The Great Viktor Mueller)
Memory dissolved into overlapping, overwhelming emotions, almost flickering through the lens of a motion picture camera, projecting moments to remember. My movie recalled his slender arms waving over deep-throated chords progressing and finding softer melodic keys in all their glory and resonance with notes that transcended time and space, enriching every moment. I saw his ivory baton resting in his hands, easily positioned to receive and control and attain perfect harmony with his orchestra. It always moved as if it were alive, dancing with a perfect, uplifting precision as if each stroke were reaching toward the infinite, toward the inexpressible, toward love, toward God, offering unimpeachable proof that music provides unforgettable recollections of love, and an interconnecting emotion of immeasurable beauty that was nothing short of inexplicable wonder.
My thoughts were compressed in this appreciable moment in time, yet opening into something we all aim to do, making a difference. Had I made a difference too?
I rode back to The Observer offices. Anna was standing over her typewriter, and she looked up at me. I put Poppy’s letter on her desk.
“I guess it’s just you and me now,” Anna said.
I took her hand as we watched evening pass from her window.
It was twelve o’clock. The hands had come together. A new morning was about to begin.
AFTERWORD
When Israel was awarded statehood by the United Nations in 1967, the Six Day War broke out and the country was heavily outnumbered by her neighbors.
After studying at Oxford, Max became a journalist. But his hands never left a piano.
I remember how concerned I was the day he received a letter from David, inviting him to come to Israel. He thought they should cover the war together. It would be like old times. By then Max was an editor at The Observer. He had become the man he wanted to be.
Max traveled to Tel Aviv to join David. Two best friends, two correspondents. Had they not always fought for freedom in their own way?
Reunited, they traveled to the Negev, where General Moshe Dayan, leader of the Israeli forces, gave them press credentials to go to the front lines.
They traveled with an Israeli tank division over the dusty desert, strong in spirit, dedicated to their shared mission. It had always been that way. They had come full circle. To fight, to report, to document, and now to defend their homeland from an attack from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.
On the second day of that war, Max was killed while riding in a half-track with members of the Israeli army, during a desert battle. David was following on foot with an infantry platoon a hundred yards away and saw the explosion. There are no words to describe David’s devastation.
He brought Max’s body home to Jerusalem, where he rests on the Avenue of the Righteous. It’s a touchstone of honor for heroes. Today a steady breeze blows through the leaves of six hundred trees.
When I first learned that Max had been killed, I went to the room that was his when he came to live with me, arriving on what he had called the shores of friendship. I was surprised to find four red notebooks in a closet, stored long ago, long overlooked. I recalled when he had first mentioned them to me, on his way to becoming a journalist. They were his first writings.
Reading them, I was overwhelmed by his terrifying experiences. Yet he wrote with grace. In the box was a well-thumbed and water-marked copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I wondered if he had indeed, as it seemed, left them for me to read.
I attended the memorial wearing a lovely hat that Max had given me. On a note of poignant tribute, David Grunewald asked the conductor of the Israel Philharmonic if he might join the orchestra that night.
The audience rose as the evening began with the Jewish National Anthem, the same sweeping stirring melody from the Vlatava, now known as the Moldau, and I was moved with memory.
Then David played for his friend one last time. Onstage there was a polished Steinway, alone in an oval pool of light. Draped over the piano were three red felt ribbons.
The orchestra performed a work by Mahler. Afterward, I happened to notice an elderly woman staring at me. She introduced herself as Frau Schmidt. Things do happen, I have learned, when you least expect them.
After telling me that she was the proprietor of a boardinghouse nearby, she just said, “Thank you.” There was no more she needed to say. I was touched by her sentiment, knowing that she was thanking me for my friendship with Max rather than any dispatch I had ever written.
For several years, I wanted to understand the real consequences and circumstances of the war I covered.
As a journalist, I’ve tried all my life to understand the nature of evil. And like many of us, I cannot reason the source of the terrifying logic by which the Nazis inflicted so much pain. In six years, a heritage, religion, culture, and tradition were almost annihilated, and it is difficult to imagine the scale of the outrage against humanity.
All over Europe, physicians, teachers, artists, and children were on lists. They had no power or privilege, but what they did have was hope. They also had a love of music. The transports were a collective struggle. At every sunrise, we can remember those who saw life not always as it was but heard it as they wanted it to be.
I still treasure Max’s notebooks, including the first one I gave him so many years ago with the blue-scored lines.
Rabbi Leo Baeck said that there must be three witnesses for every battle. Two were Max Mueller and David Grunewald. Now I’m the third. And this was my assignment.
Anna Kingsley
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are many people who craft a book, to whose appreciation transcends lyrical boundaries. The one you hold in your hand happened because of those who played its song—and indeed, they were the music makers. Deepest admiration and affection to my supportive agent Beth Davey, who championed this novel—making sure this author never forgot the song of it all. And in harmony, great editors—Karl French, Madeline Hopkins, Professor Mary Posses. They all fine-tuned and underscored every line. My thanks to those who contributed in so many ways; Tara Baiman, Richard Steinberg, Aki Schilz representing The Literary Consultancy in London, and Kveta Pacovska, the loved artist of the Czech Republic. My love and appreciation to Zdena and Václav Flegle in Prague, who introduced me to Hans Krása’s magnificent score—the children’s opera that was sung with courage in a concentration camp, and whose spirit overcame direst conditions. His music and their voices were my inspiration. It has been my privilege to publish with Blackstone, whose unwavering dedication was conducted with amazing contribution. Deepest appreciation to the remarkables—Addi Black, Josie Woodbridge, Megan Wahrenbrock, Jeffrey Yamaguchi, Lauren Maturo, Deirdre Curley, and book designer, Sean Thomas—for who you are—for what you
do. And for Natalya and Andrew Lande, who make me better than I am. With the writing of this book, I have been in the company of heroes whose stories I can never forget. Thank you.
Nathaniel Lande
Santa Barbara, California
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Artwork by Květa Pacovská
While Max Mueller and many of the characters in this novel are my own invention, real people and events are threaded through the narrative—although I have taken some liberties with details and dates to accommodate a Terezín timeline. Also, for example, the Elbe and Ohře tributaries make their way into the Vltava River, which runs through Prague. Yet I have taken artistic license with the flow of unpredictable currents.
Today, an exceptionally large number of performances of Brundibár are seen around the world, mainly in Europe and the USA, but also in Israel, Canada, South America, Australia, and Japan, and they are staged by both professional and amateur companies. When Brundibár is performed, the opera is received with heartfelt appreciation. In the Czech Republic, the most renowned Brundibár production is performed by the Disman Ensemble of Prague under the direction of Václav and Zdena Flegl. This production is also “officially” recognized as the closest to the original. In contemporary Brundibár productions, such as Tony Kushner’s adaptation, there is an attempt to create a link between the opera and its background to understand the special circumstances at Terezín, but the original Theresienstadt production seems to be much more authentic and powerful, one that was used as a metaphor of personal and collective resistance. Selections from the score can be heard on
Amazon.com and the album is available to purchase.
Brundibár expressed with music and image what could not be easily said in the spoken word. Terezín audiences were given courage and hope for the future. The moral of the opera was close to the children’s hearts; it reflected their perception of the world, their need for justice and right.
There are over eighty texts of the opera in German schools, and it is studied in many other languages and presented in major concert halls around the world: London, Essen, Trieste, Leipzig, Utrecht, Antwerp, Washington, New York, Geneva, Montreal, Vienna, Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Oslo, Stockholm, Brussels, Barcelona.
Hans Krása
Hans Krása was a Czech composer. He studied both the piano and violin as a child and went on to study composition at the German Music Academy in Prague. Brundibár was based on a play by Aristophanes and was the last work Krása completed before he was arrested by the Nazis in World War II. He was deported to the Terezín concentration camp, where a remarkable musical community flourished among its Jewish prisoners. The children’s opera was performed fifty-five times in the camp and for a visit by the International Red Cross before Krása and most of the cast were transported to Auschwitz, where they perished. The opera’s final scene was later captured in the Nazi propaganda film Theresienstadt, under the deceptive title Der Führer Schenkt den Juden eine Stadt, “The Führer Gives the Jews a City.” Ironically, the scene included in the film where Brundibár is defeated never made it to the German screens during the war. The opera was a moral triumph over the horror in this time and place. While he was interned, Krása was at his most productive, composing a number of chamber works although, due to the circumstances, some of these have not survived. He was killed at Auschwitz.
Kurt Gerron
The famed actor and director made a film of the Red Cross visit at Terezín. It is currently held in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives in Washington, DC. Gerron died in Auschwitz in 1944.
Rabbi Leo Baeck
A twentieth-century German rabbi, author, scholar, and theologian who survived Terezín. The Leo Baeck Institute for the study of the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry was established in 1955 in New York and London.
Viktor Frankl
The noted psychologist and physician was the author of Man’s Search for Meaning. A Terezín survivor, he had held a position as professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School before World War II.
Rafael Schächter
A Czechoslovak composer, pianist, and conductor of Jewish origin, and an organizer of cultural life in Terezín. He led approximately sixteen performances of Verdi’s Requiem, the first in January 1942 with a chorus of one hundred and fifty and a piano for accompaniment. Over the following months, even as his choir shrank, the Requiem was performed approximately fifteen additional times. The final performance, however, served as propaganda, as Schächter was forced to perform excerpts of the oratorio before the visiting members of the International Red Cross. A few months after this final performance, on October 16, 1944, under transport serial number 943, Schächter was loaded into a railroad cattle car with the entire cast. They were taken on a three-day journey to the Auschwitz death camp where they were murdered.
Raoul Wallenberg
Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who worked for the British Resistance. In Nazi-occupied Hungary, he led an extensive and successful mission to save the lives of nearly one hundred thousand Hungarian Jews. Though his efforts to save Jews from the Holocaust is among one of the most treasured achievements of the Resistance, his ultimate fate remains unknown still to this day. On January 17, 1945, on his way out of the capital with a Russian escort, Wallenberg and his driver planned to stop at “Swedish Houses” to say goodbye to his friends. He never arrived there, nor was he ever heard of again.
Reinhard Heydrich
Reinhard Heydrich a high-ranking German Nazi official during World War II, and the main architect of the Holocaust. He chaired the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, which formalized plans for the final solution to the Jewish question—the deportation and genocide of all Jews in German-occupied Europe. He helped organize Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany. Upon his arrival in Prague, Heydrich sought to eliminate opposition to the Nazi occupation by suppressing Czech culture and deporting and executing members of the Czech Resistance. He was directly responsible for the Einsatzgruppen, the special task forces which traveled in the wake of the German armies and murdered over two million people, including 1.3 million Jews, by mass shooting and gassing. Heydrich was critically wounded in Prague on May 27, 1942, as a result of Operation Anthropoid. He was ambushed by a team of Czech agents trained by the British Special Operations Executive. Heydrich died from his injuries a week later.
PHOTOGRAPHS AND
ILLUSTRATIONS FROM Terezín
Major Concentration
Camps and Jewish
Deaths at Each
Auschwitz: 1.6 million
Bergen-Belsen: 50,000
Buchenwald: 65,000
Dachau: 35,000
Dora-Nordhausen: 20,000
Flossenburg: 27,000
Gross-Rosen: 105,000
Janowska: 40,000
Kaiserwald: 10,000
Klooga: 2,400
Mauthausen: 120,000
Natzweiler-Struthof: 17,000
Neuengamme: 55,000
Ninth Fort: 10,000
Pawiak Prison: 37,000
Płaszów: 8,000
Poniatowa: 15,000
Ravensbrück: 92,000
Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg: 105,000
Sajmište-Semlin: 50,000
Sered’: 13,500
Stutthof: 85,000
Terezín: 48,930
Trawniki: 10,000
Total Deaths from
Nazi Genocidal Policies
European Jews: 6,250,000
Soviet Prisoners of War: 3,000,000
Polish Catholics: 3,000,000
Serbians: 700,000
Roma, Sinti, and Lalleri: 250,000
Germans: Political, Religious, and Resistance: 80,000
Germans: Handicapped: 70,000
Hom
osexuals: 12,000
Jehovah’s Witnesses: 2,500
The author appreciates and acknowledges the research and dispatches adapted from the Holocaust Chronicles Publications International, Ltd., and the support of the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC.
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