The hurried pencil drawings are eloquent. One is of a café, with smartly dressed people listening to a three-piece band. But there are no drinks on the tables, there's a soldier on duty outside, and everyone has dead eyes. There's more life in the portraits done by an opera librettist of his musical friends: they wear their clothes with rakish elegance, and are clearly in full creative flow. And there's one detail that these artists often include: a Star of David on the breast-pocket, bearing the word "Jude"
Anne Sofie Von Otter, to her everlasting credit, brings back to life the music written in Terezin. Via Jessicamusic.
La signora Von Otter also had personal reasons to do this project:
According to historians, Baron von Otter, secretary to the Swedish Legation in Berlin, had learned horrific details about the mass killing of Jews when he shared a compartment on a train in August 1942 with SS officer Kurt Gerstein. As head of the Technical Disinfection Department of the Waffen SS, Gerstein was charged with improving the efficiency of the gas chambers by using the toxic agent Zyklon-B.The Nazi officer unburdened his soul to von Otter during the night-long train ride to Berlin from Warsaw.
“This was news to my father. He didn’t know about the death camps, but at the (Swedish) Foreign Ministry they did, apparently,” Anne Sofie von Otter told Sveriges Radio, the national public radio channel. “Nothing came of it.”
“I know that my father was troubled for the rest of his life, because no action was taken,” she said. “One can do this project for its own sake, but I am also doing it a little bit in memory of my papa.”