On the evening of Yom HaShoah, thanks to Stan and Carol Newman, Sue and I were present at a remarkable event, the performance at Catholic University of “Defiant Requiem—Verdi At Terezin.” “Defiant Requiem” is a “Concert/Drama” that reenacts the story of Rafael Schachter and the Chorus of Jewish inmates he organized and conducted at the Terezin Slave Labor Camp. At Terezin the Nazis gathered a few Jewish craftsmen, performing artists, and scholars and allowed them to practice their professions. The Nazis hoped that invited dignitaries would be deceived into believing that Jews were being well treated there and thus in the other slavery and death camps. Presented through narration, archival footage, taped survivor interviews, and graphical materials projected on large screens, the drama is woven into a performance of the Verdi Requiem, which the Terezin Chorus performed sixteen times without the Nazis realizing that the Jews were spitting out defiance through the music’s angry depiction of the Day of Judgement when God would punish their murders for their horrible crimes.
Because a requiem mass is Christian liturgy, and the inmates despised Christianity for its role in the terrible destiny that was overtaking them, the members of the chorus were ambivalent about performing Verdi’s powerful work. Besides, the Requiem is scored for a very large symphony orchestra. The inmates had only a piano. But Shachter’s musical genius, boundless enthusiasm, great charm, and the relief, even uplift, that singing afforded the performers after long hours of slave labor persuaded the singers to put aside their ambivalence and prepare and present the concerts, in the teeth of the constant depletion of their ranks by deaths and transhipments to the death camps. In the end, virtually all the chorus members were shipped to Auschwitz and Schachter himself disappeared. The paradox in this narrative is excruciating: On the one hand the ennobling work and performance of a great musical masterpiece, and on the other the horrid ending that only a few escaped.1
“Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezin” is the work of Murry Sidlin, the Jewish Dean of Catholic University’s School of Music. It was presented at the end of a week-long symposium of events “designed to honor Terezin’s artists and scholars who created a rich musical, artistic, and intellectual life in the face of overwhelming hardship and cruelty during the Holocaust”, a symposium that, besides Catholic University, included the Holocaust Museum, the embassies of Austria and Israel, and the D.C. Jewish Community Center. The Chorus of 150 were mostly Catholic University students, as were the orchestra members. Four vocal soloists, three actions and conductor Sidlin completed the company.
Like the Terezin Chorus members, I, too, feel a certain ambivalence, though about a comparatively trivial matter, namely about Catholics and some other Christians in a sense “appropriating” Yom HaShoah, marking the date we Jews have selected to memorialize probably the most horrible experience in our long and tortured history with observances of their own, frequently in conjunction with Jews. Whose Holocaust is it, anyway? But I have come to understand the motives behind these Christian observances and therefore not to be put off by them. Put aside the Christians, including Christian clergy, who perished because in one way or another they opposed the fiendish Nazi pact with the devil. The Holocaust has led the Catholic Church and some other Christian denominations to confront the evil they had done to the Jews in the past and the role that Christian doctrine, teaching, and liturgy played in lighting the fire that Hitler fed with gasoline. The observance of Yom HaShoah by the Christian churches symbolizes determination to put an end to Christian anti-Judaism, and sincere acts of contrition, of which changes in doctrine and teaching are the sinews. Just as we are individually commanded to be placated when someone who has wronged us seeks to make amends, so should we accept Christian Holocaust observance for the sign of repentance and friendship that it is.2
Possibly the turmoil and recognition that attending a Christian Holocaust observance generated intensified my existential response to “Defiant Requiem,” but it is a profoundly moving religious and artistic work in its own right. Verdi’s Requiem is a powerful work. “Defiant Requiem” weaves it into the horror and majesty of the Terezin experience. As each section of the music reaches a climactic moment, the narrative is resumed and as each episode of the narration climaxes, the music returns, each heightening the effect of the other. When, finally, the Mass comes to an end while the screens show Terezin’s Jews first milling about at a railroad station and then climbing into the cattle cars that took them to their deaths, the Chorus sings the final words of the Latin Mass: “Give them eternal rest, O Lord, and may perpetual light illumine them.” And as the work is coming to an end the chorus, orchestra, soloists, and actors and finally the conductor silently leave the hall. Like the Terezin prisoners, singly and in groups, they disappear. There is no applause. Narrative, music, and prayer merge with reenactment.
When the reenactment ended I was convulsed with grief. I did not regain my equanimity for what seemed a very long time. No previous Holocaust or yizkor observance has ever moved me as much. “Requiem eternam dona eis....”; “v’yanuhu b’shalom al mishkavam.” 3 May the six million rest in peace.
Rabbi George Driesen
135,000 Jews died in Terezin, and the survivors were transported to the extermination camps in Poland where most perished.
2Christian Holocaust observance is not focused on Jews alone, of course. It also responds to Christian belief and theological issues that the Holocaust raises or implicates.
3The Hebrew is from “El Maley Rahamim,” a prayer chanted at Yizkor and often at funerals.