Karel Ančerl was a Czechoslovak conductor and composer, renowned especially for his performances of contemporary music and for his interpretations of music by Czech composers.
Brundibár is a children's opera by Jewish Czech composer Hans Krása with a libretto by Adolf Hoffmeister, made most famous by performances by the children of Theresienstadt concentration camp (Terezín) in occupied Czechoslovakia. The name comes from a Czech colloquialism for a bumblebee.
Kurt Gerron was a German Jewish actor and film director. He and his wife, Olga, were murdered in the Holocaust.
Theresienstadt Ghetto was established by the SS during World War II in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Theresienstadt served as a waystation to the extermination camps. Its conditions were deliberately engineered to hasten the death of its prisoners, and the ghetto also served a propaganda role. Unlike other ghettos, the exploitation of forced labor was not economically significant.
Hans Krása was a Czech composer. He was killed during the Holocaust at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He helped to organize cultural life in Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Pavel Haas was a Czech composer who was murdered during the Holocaust. He was an exponent of Leoš Janáček's school of composition, and also utilized elements of folk music and jazz. Although his output was not large, he is notable particularly for his song cycles and string quartets.
Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet, unofficially Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt, was a black-and-white projected Nazi propaganda film. It was directed by the German Jewish prisoner Kurt Gerron and the Czech filmmaker Karel Pečený under close SS supervision in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and edited by Pečený's company, Aktualita. Filmed mostly in the autumn of 1944, it was completed on 28 March 1945 and screened privately four times. After the war, the film was lost but about twenty minutes of footage was later rediscovered in various archives.
James Simon was a German composer, pianist and musicologist.
University over the Abyss is a book about the educational and cultural life in the Terezín ghetto. Authors Elena Makarova, Sergei Makarov and Viktor Kuperman have searched available archives, interviewed survivors worldwide and compiled the definitive summary of this nominally illegal but extensive phenomenon that included formal lectures, poetry readings, concerts, storytelling sessions and theatrical and opera performances, all in a setting that was a holding place for prisoners who were ultimately on their way to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
Carlo Sigmund Taube was a Czech Jewish pianist, composer and conductor.
Voices of the Children is a 1999 Emmy-Award winning documentary film written and directed by Zuzana Justman. It tells the story of three people who were imprisoned as children in the Terezin concentration camp. It was produced and shown on television in the United States.
Spuren nach Theresienstadt / Tracks to Terezín is a film with Herbert Thomas Mandl, a survivor of the Holocaust.
Fritz Weiss was a Czech jazz musician and arranger, active in the first half of the 20th century. He was an organizer of jazz performances and an important participant in the musical life of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Weiss was murdered in the Holocaust.
Martin Roman was a German jazz pianist.
Heinz Jakob "Coco" Schumann was a German jazz musician and Holocaust survivor. He became a member of the Ghetto Swingers while transported to Theresienstadt at the age of nineteen. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Schumann performed as a jazz guitarist, with Marlene Dietrich, Ella Fitzgerald, and Helmut Zacharias.
Josef (Pepek) Taussig was a Czech journalist.
Eric T. Vogel was a Czech jazz trumpeter. In 1938, Vogel played trumpet in a dixieland combo. After being arrested at Brno in 1939 he was made to organize a jazz school in the Jewish ghetto of that city. In Theresienstadt concentration camp he played with Martin Roman's Ghetto Swingers and Fritz Weiss's Jazz-Quintet-Weiss. He escaped while being transferred to Dachau concentration camp.
Karel Švenk, sometimes referred to in German as Karl Schwenk, was a Czech cabaret artist, comedian, songwriter and writer. A leading figure in the cabaret at the Theresienstadt Ghetto, Svenk was eventually sent to Auschwitz and later to Meuselwitz. He died on a death march from Kraslice about two weeks before the end of the war. Being completely exhausted and unable to continue, his friend hid him in the straw in the barn where the prisoners spent the night. It is unknown whether he died of exhaustion or was discovered by the SS and shot.
Theresienstadt was originally designated as a model community for middle-class Jews from Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. Many educated Jews were inmates of Theresienstadt. In a propaganda effort designed to fool the western allies, the Nazis publicised the camp for its rich cultural life. In reality, according to a Holocaust survivor, "during the early period there were no [musical] instruments whatsoever, and the cultural life came to develop itself only ... when the whole management of Theresienstadt was steered into an organized course."
