(Jewish Group) Amid the Horrors of the Holocaust, Jewish Musicians Composed Songs of Survival
In 1988, Mark Ludwig, a tenured violist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was between events at New York City’s Carnegie Hall when he wandered into his favorite used bookshop. He picked up a biography of Leo Baeck, the 20th-century German rabbi and scholar. Baeck had been imprisoned during World War II at the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. He’d survived, settled in London and become one of the foremost theologians of his day. Something in the book caught Ludwig’s attention—Baeck’s observation that despite the hardship and cruelty of the camp, inmates produced an impressive output of high-quality classical music.
Ludwig had heard of Terezin: The Nazis had established it as a way station to the notorious extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau. He knew that famous artists and musicians had been incarcerated there. He had seen I Never Saw Another Butterfly, a book of the children’s art created in secret classes at the camp. But he was not aware of the musical compositions. So the next time he was in Europe, he went to an archive in Prague, where the director handed him some sheet music written by one of the inmates.
“I opened the score and started playing it in my mind’s ear,” says Ludwig, who was then in his early 30s. “And the beauty of it was astounding. It opened up a whole new world to me in terms of music.”
The music was written by Gideon Klein, a Czech composer who was murdered by the Nazis at the age of 25. Ludwig was intrigued. As a musician who grew up in a family of musicians, he was acquainted with the classical repertoire, yet he hadn’t realized the inmates of Terezin had produced such beautiful music. He decided to investigate.
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