A YEAR OR TWO AFTER THE WAR, AS AN ADOLESCENT, I MET a young Jewish couple some five years older than I. They had spent their youth in the Terezín concentration camp and later in another camp. I felt intimidated by their fate; it was beyond me. My awe irritated them: “Stop that! Just stop it!” and they insisted I see that life there had retained its full range, with jokes as well as tears, tenderness as well as horror. For love of their own lives, they refused to be transformed into legends, into statues of misfortune, into a file in the black book of Nazism. I’ve completely lost track of them since, but I have never forgotten what they urged me to understand.
Terezín, in Czech; Theresienstadt, in German. A city turned into a ghetto that the Nazis used as a showcase, where they allowed their prisoners to live a relatively civilized life in order to show them off to the pushovers from the International Red Cross. The place collected Jews from Central Europe, mostly from its Austro-Czech regions; among them were many intellectuals, composers, writers, of the great generation who had lived in the glow of Freud, Mahler, Janáček, Schoenberg’s Viennese school, the Prague structuralists.
They were under no illusions: they were living in death’s antechamber; their cultural life was on exhibit by Nazi propaganda as an alibi; but should that be a reason to refuse freedom, however precarious and fraudulent? Their response was utterly clear: their creations, their art shows, their concerts, their loves, the whole array of their lives were incomparably more important than their jailers’ macabre theatrics. That was their wager. Their intellectual and artistic activity leaves us dumbstruck: not only at the work they managed to produce (I think of the composers! Pavel Haas, Janáček’s pupil, who taught me composition when I was a child! And Hans Krasa! And Gideon Klein! And Karel Ančerl, who after the war became one of the greatest conductors in Europe!) but perhaps even more, at the thirst for culture that, in those dreadful conditions, gripped the whole Terezín community.
What did art mean to them? It was the way to keep fully deployed the whole range of feeling and thought so that life should not be reduced to the single dimension of horror. And for the artists held there? They saw their personal destinies fused with the fate of modern art, the art called “degenerate,” the art that was hunted down, mocked, condemned to death. I have before me the poster for a concert in the Terezín of the time: Mahler, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Haba. Under the executioners’ watch the condemned played condemned music.
I think of the last years of this past century. Memory, the duty of memory, the work of memory, were the banner words of that time. It was considered an act of honor to hunt out past political crimes, right down to their very shadows, down to their last vile stains. And yet that very particular sort of memory, incriminating memory, the diligent handmaiden of punishment, had nothing in common with the sort of memory so passionately important to the Jews at Terezín, who cared not a damn about immortalizing their torturers and instead did all they could to preserve the memory of Mahler and Schoenberg.
Once, as I was discussing this topic with a friend, I asked him: “Do you know ‘A Warsaw Survivor’?” “A survivor? Who? What survivor?” He didn’t know what I was talking about. And yet A Warsaw Survivor (Ein Überlebender aus Warschau), an oratorio by Arnold Schoenberg, is the greatest monument music ever dedicated to the Holocaust. The whole existential essence of the drama of the Jews in the twentieth century is kept alive in it. In all its fearsome grandeur. In all its fearsome beauty. People fight to ensure that the murderers should not be forgotten. But Schoenberg they forget.