They play a Schubert symphony, a piece that Hana has always previously found highly emotional but now seems simply overwrought. The officers and others clap politely at its conclusion, though they seem to have enjoyed the music tremendously. When the applause stops, Otto rises from his held bow and addresses the audience in excellent German: “There will be a ten-minute intermission, and then we will play Herr Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.” The officers murmur their approval as they rise to stretch their legs, and the inmates who have been holding the curtains allow them to drop closed.
The children who will be singing the choral portion of the fourth movement are escorted in by two guards. They have not been rehearsing with the orchestra but only with Otto and a vocal coach, who have adapted this complicated material for their younger voices, and their presence generates excitement among the orchestra members. Men and women alike reach out to embrace children they do not know, to touch soft cheeks, freshly-combed hair, small hands, bird-like shoulders. Many weep, though the children stand stoically, accepting this attention as their due but attaching no emotion to it as the adults do.
Hana reaches for the child nearest to her, a homely, small girl who may be five but could be eight or even ten, and pulls her next to her on the bench in an embrace that pricks too much of bone. “What is your name?” she asks the girl in Czech, and, when the child does not respond, she asks again in German, in French, even English.
“She is a Pole,” says Otto. Hana looks up and there he is, leaning his hands on the piano, a Bechstein Grand brought by special truck for this evening alone. “What is your name?” Otto asks the girl in Polish.
“Wanda,” she answers shyly, directly looking at Hana for the first time. “Wanda Steinberg.”
Hana points to herself. “Hana Weissova,” she says. Then, in Czech, “I am from Prague.”
“Prague,” echoes the girl, and then says, “Krakow,” pointing to herself. It is something. It may even be enough, all that Hana can hope for anymore. She draws Wanda close, Wanda Steinberg from Krakow, and she murmurs in the child’s hair, “Je t’aime. Je t’aime,” an incantation whose source she cannot identify, while Wanda experimentally touches the keys of the piano, an E, then an F.
The voices of the children rise at dusk, a sound at once perfect and heartbreaking. Much of the oratorio is a capella, and the musicians allow themselves to listen, to be transported, to rise on the music’s wings and take flight.
Hana looks unseeing into the audience, the lovely high voices filling her and then lifting her out of herself. Then, all at once, she does see. She sees the Commandant in the front row between two of the visitors, all sitting stiffly, shoulders back, chins high. Hana has not dared to look at the Commandant since Dori died, afraid her face will betray her complicity, that he will read her face and know.
But the Commandant cannot see Hana now. The Commandant is crying. Tears spill unimpeded from the corners of his eyes and course down his cheeks; his eyes are riveted on a child, though Hana cannot be sure which.
Hana thinks that this evidence of humanity should make her feel differently about the Commandant, but it does not. Hypocrite, she thinks. Filthy beast. Then the Commandant suddenly shifts his gaze to her, as if he has heard her thoughts. Hana wants to look away, but something holds her eyes to his. The Commandant nods. And smiles. Hana feels a bile rising in her throat and gags, swallows it back, and then—oh hypocrite! oh beast!—returns the smile. The Commandant nods again and turns back to the child. And Hana turns the page and, on her cue, resumes playing.
From November 1941 to July 1943, Theresienstadt was run by a man named Siegfried Seidl. After the war, he was tried and sentenced by a Czechoslovak court, and hanged. I would like to think that Hana Weissova was present at that hanging, but most probably she was not.
Considering it was a concentration camp, Terezín’s musical activity was remarkable. Even before a legless piano was discovered in an unused basement, choral groups and chamber orchestras were flourishing. By the end of 1942, a committee of the Jewish Council called the Frezeitgestaltung, sanctioned by the SS command, was overseeing the organization of cultural activities and arranging performances of the many orchestras.
Musicians “employed” by the Frezeitgestaltung were exempt from regular work duties, a situation which helps to explain the prodigious amount of composition that went on at the camp. At the same time, personnel in the orchestras was in a state of flux: transports “to the East,” to Auschwitz and Birkenau, meant positions opened up far too often.
The training and leanings of the composers ranged from traditional to avant-garde to jazz, though the inclusion of folk themes—often cleverly disguised within polytonal structures—was a common thread. Czech songs, Yiddish lullabies, Hebrew prayers, and Israeli work songs all found their way into Terezín compositions, and were often sung by the many talented opera singers interred at the camp, although, as with the musicians, turnover was a given for these performers as well.
Terezín was the SS’s “model camp,” peopled with the “elite” of European Jewry, though in the Nazi master plan for the extermination of the Jewish race, still only a waystation before transport to Auschwitz. But, unlike at other camps, its day-to-day activities were run by a Jewish Council; its inhabitants had their own clothes; and, provided they could get a sought-after ticket, these same inhabitants could attend the concerts given by their talented fellow-Jews.
But while the variety of music played at Terezín reads like a roster of old masters and modern composers, conspicuously absent are the works of Richard Wagner.
Wagner, like Hitler, was a rabid anti-Semite (and, also like Hitler, was rumored to have a Jewish skeleton in his ancestry). And while it was Wagner who is responsible for the musical drama that defines modern opera, it was also Wagner’s works that became the inspirational music of the Third Reich.
The musicians of Terezín selected music for its merits, without allowing prejudice due to national origin to color their decisions. But Wagner reminded them of where they were, and why, and reminders were not necessary.
The prelude to Wagner’s Tristan and Isölde may be one of the most transcendental compositions ever written. The strings spiral upward while the music swells in a crescendo that seems to yearn toward eternity. One of my professors at the Rochester Institute of Music suggested that the creation of such a piece of music was an epitaph few could achieve but to which all should aspire.
This professor did not mention Wagner’s politics, and, if asked, he would have said, Why should I? There are many artists whose politics should arguably be separated from their art: Ezra Pound comes to mind, as does T. S. Eliot. But do we honor the man or his work? Can the work be honored without giving the man homage as well? With modern writers, like Solzhenitzin and Achebe, whose sensibilities mirror our own, the question becomes a non-issue.
But perhaps it should not. Perhaps art is a subversive vehicle. Perhaps the artist’s motives should be coupled with his creation in our assessment of it. On the other hand, artists are only human; perhaps we should forgive them their human foibles.
The short, cold January days kept me indoors, and I pored over Hana Weissova’s papers until they showed signs of too much handling, and I placed them carefully into ziplocked bags that I lay inside my piano bench.
I’d found a book about Terezín, by a Czech-American musician, a non-Jew who, like myself, had become obsessed with the place and its legacy. I began to wonder whether any of the compositions the author mentioned had been recorded, and decided when the snow and ice had melted off the hill I’d drive down to Santa Fe and see what I could find out.
Which left me with time on my hands. Several times I thought about calling Joyce Maisel and inviting her family to dinner, but my hand always froze on the receiver: What would I say? And planning one night’s dinner party would make but a small dent in the yawning space of time that opened out before me.
Oh, I played. I played, and I entertained my young students fi
ve afternoons a week. I cooked breakfast and dinner for my husband and packed him daily lunches, and I dusted and I vacuumed and I read, haphazardly, as always.
It was something I read that sent me to the attic, reached via a pull-down ladder in the attached garage. It was a recipe, of all things, a recipe for linzertorte that I was certain my mother had once made (my mother who so seldom cooked or baked), and I determined to go through her things and find it.
It is not so odd that I’d never opened those boxes before; for years, they sat in a back room at my father’s house, and Paul had moved them to our attic when my father died. My father’s papers were, of course, the property of the Lab or the Army—I wasn’t sure which—but my mother’s had been packed away thirty years ago (by whom? I didn’t know that, either) and now awaited me, five medium-sized boxes with that dry cardboard smell peculiar to things stored in the southwest, closed with yellowed tape, labeled in black marker by a hand I didn’t recognize.
Whoever had done the packing had done it quickly: There was no method of organization to the cartons’ contents, and little boxes of costume jewelry (oh, I remembered that butterfly brooch! those sliver clip-on earrings shaped like roses!) lay amongst faded invitations, cocktail napkins, yellowing scores of symphonies and sonatas, old unlabeled photographs, abandoned lists of things to do.
I opened one up, a list of things to do, written on the back of a flyer announcing ancient supermarket specials (iceberg lettuce 19c; homogenized milk 23c) with a blue fountain pen in my mother’s cramped, spidery scrawl. Dress for Anna, it said. Tsolidschaya vodka. Leon’s blue suit to dry cleaners. Candles for mother’s candlesticks. Tangerines. French Suites #5 in G Major.
I was crying. I hadn’t realized it until the tears dripped onto the list and smeared a thirty-year-old “t.” Why should I cry over a list? I folded it and took instead a card from an envelope. For my mother on her birthday, it said. I didn’t recognize this card, all hearts and flowers, not my style, and when I opened it I understood why: my father had signed my name: I love you, mommy. Anna. The year was 1948, the year I was born.
I wiped my nose on my sleeve and plodded on, though I’d long forgotten my original purpose. In the third or fourth carton I opened, I came on a small deep white box embossed with a white fleur-de-lis, and when I opened it unwrapped the tattered doily folded across the top. But what was this? I lifted it out, two beige-brown squares of—wood? cardboard? styrofoam? The texture on the top was slightly different, smoother than the larger, rougher surface. I ran my finger across it and it rasped, like sandpaper. Then I looked down at the open lid.
Katherine Simms & Leon Holtz, it said, that blue fountain pen again, that unmistakable script. June 12, 1940. My God. Fifty-five years ago my mother had wrapped and saved two pieces of her wedding cake and put them in this box. And now I had opened it. Across those years, my mother touched me.
I rewrapped the squares carefully and put the little box back, then repacked the rest of the carton and closed it, too. Then I climbed back down the ladder-stairs and pushed them up into their rectangle, the automatic ceiling panel slipping into place without a sound.
Rehearsals for Verdi’s Requiem began in the Summer of 1943, but not before a heated debate among the members of the Frezeitgestaltung. Hana, now in charge of the activities of the many small chamber groups, did not take part in the dispute, though she followed the arguments of the two sides with fascination.
While Prague’s Jews had long been assimilated, newcomers to Terezín included Jews from all over Eastern and Central Europe, and it was these who raised the most vocal objections to performing what was, after all, a Roman Catholic mass for the dead. Just as vehement were the project’s supporters, who argued that the Requiem was above all an exquisite opera, but that, at the same time, a prayer for the dead—no matter what religion it originated in—was not a project without meaning. Rumors of what happened to those “sent east” had long since filtered back to the camp, and, whether one chose to believe them or not, a prayer was not out of order.
The more secular argument prevailed, and four soloists and their alternates began rehearsals with the accompaniment of a sole pianist, a role Hana shared with the young composer Gideon Klein, who had adapted Verdi’s piano-less orchestration into a serviceable one-piano accompaniment, and who played the premiere performance in early September.
Hana sat next to the stage and watched the barracks fill with those fortunate enough to obtain tickets, now as valuable a commodity as cigarettes and loaves of bread. It never occurred to Hana that the importance of cultural activities to Terezín’s occupants was extreme; to Europe’s intelligentsia they were as important as food and sleep.
The audience for the premiere was not a surprise: members of the Jewish Council, their families and their closest friends; and relatives and friends of the principal performers. This did not include Hana’s family, since she was not playing this night.
When the audience was seated, the performers filed onto the stage and the barracks became silent, the audience watching the soloists expectantly. Hana watched Gideon Klein take advantage of this anticipation, lift his hands above the keyboard and then keep them suspended there for a moment longer than necessary while he made eye contact with each of those in the front row.
Then he dropped his hands to the keyboard and played. Hana felt she could not hope to have the talent of Gideon Klein, decided she would never play again, and then a moment later was overcome with the desire to play at once. She slipped out a back door to the practice room in the next barracks. Her authority as a Frezeitgestaltung member was enough that her movement no longer elicited alarm among the guards.
Her initial impulse was to play what she had just heard, but the much-abridged music sounded oddly attenuated without the accompanying oratorio and she switched to a series of Chopin Etudes. From across the alley, the Requiem occasionally swelled loudly enough to reach the room where Hana played, and then she would stop and strain to hear more clearly, though she could play the entire piece in her head if she wished. In the silence left when she ceased playing, she suddenly heard another sound, a scurrying movement, and looked quickly in its direction to see something scuttle into the shadows at the other end of the room. “Who’s there?” she said, her voice startling. When no one answered, she rose and walked toward the shadows. There, huddled behind a chair, clutching a crayon and a treasured piece of paper, cowered her son, Pavel.
“Don’t tell,” he whispered.
Hana knelt next to him and drew him to her in an embrace he did not return. “Pavel,” she said. “I am your mother. Why would I tell? I am so happy to see you! My little love! Are you well?”
“You can’t tell,” Pavel said into her neck.
“But what are you doing here?” Hana asked. She reached for the paper the boy clutched tightly and then relinquished, and smoothed it out on the floor next to them: it was a drawing of herself, playing, a quick sketch which nonetheless captured both the movement and the essence of the player. “Oh Pavel,” she said. “This is wonderful!”
Pavel squirmed out of her grasp and made to run out, but she grabbed his ankle. “Keep it then,” he said, “if it means you won’t tell.”
“Pavel,” Hana said, releasing her hold on his ankle. “I won’t tell.” But the boy was already gone by the time she said it.
The day after the premiere of the Requiem, another transport left for the east. Among those on it were two of the Requiem’s soloists, and Pavel Weiss, Hana Weissova’s six-year-old son. Hana hoped he knew she had not told.
The Requiem proved so popular that performances continued throughout the winter of 1943-1944, and it was one of the pieces selected by the SS for the visit of the International Committee of the Red Cross in late July of 1944. The Nazis had decided to film this event, and so, for weeks beforehand, Terezín’s inhabitants were enlisted for sprucing-up activities: painting, gardening, brickwork. Even Frezeitgestaltung members were not exempt from these work details, but the
change in routine generated a lightheartedness the detainees had not felt for some time.
Hana was assigned to work in the garden, as was Mother Weissova, and the two women knelt side-by-side, placing pansies and impatiens at the intervals proscribed by the careful SS planners. Neither mentioned Pavel, though he was foremost in both their thoughts, instead keeping their conversation resolutely free of import. When one of the Requiem’s sopranos came and fetched Hana for rehearsal, Hana and her mother-in-law embraced quickly and lightly. “I will see you tomorrow,” Mother Weissova said.
But the camp was too crowded to present the ideal image the SS wished to project to the outside world, and the next day a large transport left with Hana’s in-laws, her daughter Heidi, and her husband Anton.
Although the SS had requested that Gideon Klein play the piano accompaniment for the special performance, Klein insisted that Hana play. “A requiem is not unlike a Kaddish,” he pointed out to her.
“They are not dead,” Hana said.
“Of course they are not,” Klein agreed. “That is all the more reason for you to play.” And while Hana did not pretend to understand his logic, she did play. “Dies irae,” the chorus sang, and, for Hana, it truly was a day of wrath.
While Gideon Klein was sent to Auschwitz in the Fall of 1944, he did not, as so many of his fellow transportees did, die there. He was moved from camp to camp as a worker, until he died in Fuhrstengrube at the end of January, 1945.
It has been said that all art aspires towards the condition of music. In the twentieth century, this statement has acquired another dimension. Artists, after all, seek to communicate with their audiences, but science insists that it is the material rather than the transcendent that is the guiding force of humanity. Transcendence has been left to those at the fringe of society, a fringe often mocked, or outright feared.
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