The most moving piece in the papers this week is Ed Vulliamy's superb account of the music composed and performed in the Terezín transit camp, the last stop en route to the gas chambers. There, music was allowed to flourish for a short time before a generation of Czech musicians and composers were exterminated.
The article is accompanied by this video account by a survivor, Zdenka Fantlova:
There is also an interactive guide available online.
Of the stories Vulliamy recounts, one of the most shocking is the way that the music was used for propaganda to fool the Red Cross about the nature of the camp, more shocking still is that the Red Cross were taken in. Please preserve us from the gullibility of the well-meaning. A propaganda film was also made in 1944 which included a performance of Hans Krása's children's opera, Brundibár, written before the war, but reconstructed in the camp. A clip of the performance is on YouTube. I find it unbearable to watch. Immediately after filming, the children were sent to Auschwitz to be murdered. Few survived.
Here is a modern performance, it is as exquisite as it is touching:
The main reason for posting this, apart from the quality of the article, is that it is at times like these that we should remember that fascism should be offered no respectability, no excuses, no understanding; it only ends in death.
The article is accompanied by this video account by a survivor, Zdenka Fantlova:
There is also an interactive guide available online.
Of the stories Vulliamy recounts, one of the most shocking is the way that the music was used for propaganda to fool the Red Cross about the nature of the camp, more shocking still is that the Red Cross were taken in. Please preserve us from the gullibility of the well-meaning. A propaganda film was also made in 1944 which included a performance of Hans Krása's children's opera, Brundibár, written before the war, but reconstructed in the camp. A clip of the performance is on YouTube. I find it unbearable to watch. Immediately after filming, the children were sent to Auschwitz to be murdered. Few survived.
Here is a modern performance, it is as exquisite as it is touching:
The main reason for posting this, apart from the quality of the article, is that it is at times like these that we should remember that fascism should be offered no respectability, no excuses, no understanding; it only ends in death.
2 comments:
"more shocking still is that the Red Cross were taken in"
Why is it so shocking? Western media refused to believe that millions were being starved and slaughtered in the Ukraine in the 1930s. People reporting the truth, like Gareth Jones, were attacked by those sympathetic to Communism. The full story of Stalin's or Mao's rule and their associated unpleasantnesses took decades to come out.
"it is at times like these that we should remember that fascism should be offered no respectability, no excuses, no understanding; it only ends in death"
You could, with just as much evidence, say the same thing of socialism - more so, in that Italian fascism wasn't terribly murderous when compared with Russian, Cambodian and Chinese socialism, or German National Socialism.
Isn't it better to proclaim that "it is necessary to return to the simpler principle that the wholesale slaughter of unarmed or disarmed men marks with a mordant and eternal brand the memory of conquerors however they may have prospered ... it is therefore only necessary to strip men capable of such deeds of all title to honour .."
Laban
The post was put up for Holocaust remembrance day, so it isn't about Mao, unsurprisingly.
If you conflate socialism (undefined) with communism, Stalinism, Maoism, the Khmer Rouge and the Nazis then you end up with a term so imprecise as to be meaningless.
On the Paulo di Canio theory of history here is one of many:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nas/summary/v006/6.1pankhurst.html
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