Defiant Requiem

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10 October 2010: Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezin

So many contemporary themes converged last Wednesday into an event at Kennedy Center honoring a hero of the Holocaust, Raphael Schaechter.

It told the story of music for a Catholic mass, Verdi's Requiem, keeping spirits alive with cultural joy in the midst of a concentration camp in the former Czechoslovakia, Theresienstadt. Clothed in rags, fed with watered-down, contaminated broth and stale bread, forced to spend their days doing hard labor and their evenings in vermin-infested barracks, many inmates died long before their bodies received the final lash or gunshot or the gallows or gas chamber or communal burial pit.

But those who heard the nightly rehearsals of Verdi's Requiem or participated as singers or instrumentalists stayed spiritually alive until they were hauled off in box cars to the Final Solution, be it Auschwitz or Dachau or any number of other infernos.

Schaechter was the maestro of the makeshift orchestra, forced to watch his players come and go, using a smuggled-in, dog-eared music score, escaping into a world of intoxicating beauty despite the surrounding nightmare.

Verdi's Requiem is cultural oxygen for all of us. Religion is not the point. Though the words come straight from the Latin mass, the passion of Jesus was a most appropriate icon for the suffering of all the Holocaust Jews and other persecuted peoples. The last two portions in particular, Agnus dei (Lamb of God) and Libera me (Free me) held words that freed up emotions and breathed life back into people long past weary after a day of slave labor.

The orchestra was allowed to perform for Nazi higher-ups from time to time, once for Adolph Eichman.

Adversity bred those strange bedfellows, if Jews breathing the oxygen of Catholicism is an unlikely combination, particularly a mass for the dead, exquisite as it was. Schaechter nurtured those souls until the day he himself was removed to Auschwitz, ironically after D-Day--June 23, 1944, to be precise. (Anne Frank was seen alive at Bergen Belsen shortly before D-Day, walking around dazed, emaciated, a tattered rag around her shoulders like a shawl.)

At the Kennedy Center symphony hall, two choruses--the City Choir of Washington and the Catholic University Chorus--sang with the Washington National Opera Orchestra, directed by Maestro Murray Sidlin. Four soloists were thrilling additions: soprano, mezzo soprano, tenor, and bass. The hall was drenched with many-tiered music, from three collectivities to four soloists to one maestro and of course the audience to absorb that ecstasy.

A screen at the front portrayed the story of Schaechter and his music by way of survivors and others who knew him--speaking voices, one at time, filled in spaces between portions of the mass. A spell-bound audience sat for two hours without an intermission.

A reception after the event supplied the most moving moments of all. A Catholic bishop spoke, along with dignitaries from the Czech Republic and Germany and the Israeli ambassador. But the in-person appearance of a few survivors, some who had spoken on screen, was the radial moment for me. I had nothing to say to them except that I would spread their story as far as I could--wordless thoughts I am activating with this review.

Anti-Semitism is a disease we must eradicate, said the dignitaries. The German spoke of how Jews were returning to his country in large numbers, building synagogues large and small.

Schaechter's niece, who had been at Theresienstadt with him until he left, was amazingly vigorous and radiant as she moved among us.

I ate wonderful food, drank wonderful wine, joy in the midst of sorrow in the midst of joy ad infinitum, a Eucharist of sorts as we vanquished death with a resolve to survive as did those few amazing people who had joined us that evening. To survive breathing and activating positive values, the highest levels of human consciousness that can defeat all evil is a solution humanity must take on, as it seems to be doing, most gradually and perhaps not soon enough. If millions of Jews died, the spirit did not, the religion remained strong, the defiant mass plays on and on.

"It's happening even now," I couldn't help thinking. "We are surviving while elsewhere martyrdom is epidemic, in Congo, in Darfur, anywhere there is human slavery and abuse of woman and exploitation of children, it's happening even now." I didn't want to destroy the triumph those survivors represented--that the death camps are now museums in Eastern Europe, whose lesson the human race has yet to fully learn.

The International Red Cross, who attended a performance of the Requiem by Schaechter and his musicians, the one Eichman also attended, heard the tones but were deaf to their cries. Theresienstadt was the location for visitors, proof that the inmates were being well treated. Portions of the camp were built like movie sets and filmed for the outside world.

So we must listen but also hear--there's something strange about Jews performing a Catholic death mass, isn't there? How tattered the conductor's score must have looked, even camouflaged within a vinyl covering, as it may have been.

We must not only listen and hear but, most difficult of all, act. Together we are capable of righting all wrongs. Don't ask me to be more precise. We must overcome the devil within all of us, activate the dream collectively, like those musicians who could make music after days of torture, conquering an externalized devil.

There is altruism, the ultimate weapon, within all of us. We worship it with words. We can do more. Somehow.

(c)