Explanation: Last year, IWRC in August or September, my wife watched on PBS a performance of Verdi’s Requiem peformed by survivors of the Holocaust or their descendants. She came away with the impression that it was done in honor of the anniversary of some event associated with the Holocaust, but does not recall what specific event it commemorated. Would anyone know of a particular event which falls in that time frame and would have been suitably commemorated by the performance? (Apparently, the reason for the Verdi piece was that it was performed by musically-inclined Jews from memory in a concentration camp, as a way of saying, “You have not broken our spirits.”)
Hmmm… was it live for sure, or possibly taped from some other time frame.?
2003 was the 60th anniversary of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto (in May).
Other than that, nothing that stands out as too significant that I can think of. I believe that the Nuremburg Race Laws were passed in September of '35 (or '36). Doubt that would be commemorated with a concert though.
I’d bet it was a commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto liquidation.
The Jewish remembrance day called Tisha B’Av (literally: ninth day of the month of Av) usually comes out in August. It’s a day commemorating many of the historical tragedies that were inflicted on the Jewish people, and most rememberances involve some Holocaust as well. However, there’s a special Holocaust Memorial Day in the spring.
The event was August 27. I couldn’t find anything significant that happened at Theresienstadt/Terezin on that date (for example on this list of deportations from the camp). Perhaps it was the anniversary of one of the performances at the camp, perhaps it’s an anniversary in the Jewish calendar, or perhaps it was just a suitable date for PBS and isn’t an anniversary.
According to Yad Vashem, 23,600 Polish and Hungarian Jews were killed at Kamenets-Podolsk on August 27-28, 1941. This was the first time during the Holocaust that over 10,000 people were killed in a single event.
Perhaps more relevant to Terezin is the Slovak national uprising, which occurred on August 28, 1944.
It was in fact the Terezin thing – which makes either Tishah b’Av or the Slovak Rising (probably the latter, in view of the close match in dates) make sense. Or, as was said, it may not have had a particular date in mind but rather have been a convenient date for the broadcast.
Wasn’t there a camp (Treblinka, perhaps?) where the Jewish internees who knew music performed Verdi’s Requiem (to a Nazi audience, no less), sort of as a way of saying “We are humans, enjoyers and producers of art and music; you are too, even if you deny it; you hear this and you know now what you do”. – ??
I remember an interview with one of the few surviving members of the musical group who put on the performance. Spoke of something like a 35% attrition rate due to camp deaths deliberately inflicted + those incidentally experienced due to conditions. And article included something about how the words, albeit in latin, condemned what the Nazis were doing, so they were essentially yelling in music what they could not say to their faces.
Here in the Netherlands we recently had a remembrance because September 13th was the sixtieth anniversary of the last train that left the Netherlands for the extermination camps.
The last train left the Westerbork internment camp for Bergen-Belsen on that day with 279 people. At that point the Nazis considered the “Judenfrage” solved for the Netherlands. The camp wasn’t liberated until April 12th, 1945, when the 8th Canadian Recce Regiment moved in.
In all, between July 1942 and September 1944, 65 trains with 58.380 victims (Jews and Roma) were transported from Westerbork to Birkenau (also known as Auschwitz II). Only 854 survived. An additional nineteen trains left Westerbork for Sobibor, taking a total of 34.313 Jews to their death. There were no survivors of these transports. Also, nine trains with 4.894 Jews left Westerbork for Theresienstadt. About two thousand people survived. Another 4.413 victims were shipped to Bergen-Belsen.
That’s a total of more than 100.000 victims, of which at most three to four thousand survived.
The camp wasn’t liberated until April 12th, 1945, when the 8th Canadian Recce Regiment moved in.