A mission to revive lost notes from the Holocaust

November 23, 2011|By James H. Burnett III, Globe Staff

When violist Mark Ludwig and friends gathered in his airy Brookline apartment to rehearse on a recent morning, the scene was a flurry of intensity, concentrated smiles, fluttering fingers, flying elbows, tossed sheet music, and flawlessly performed concertos.

But the levity and excitement belied both the music’s tragic roots and the serious nature of one man’s 20-year mission to bring it to light.

Ludwig created the nonprofit Terezin Music Foundation in 1991 to preserve and revive music that Jewish artists created while interned at Terezin (pronounced tear-eh-ZEEN), or Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in Prague where the Nazis during World War II housed people whose art they considered impure.

This month the foundation marked its 20th anniversary with performances by pianist Garrick Ohlsson, maestro Andre Previn, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, all done in the style of Terezin composers.

More than the performances, though, the 20th anniversary gala marked what many classical music elite say has been Ludwig’s extraordinary effort to memorialize an inanimate victim of the Holocaust that might have been lost otherwise.

“For me this has been an almost spiritual mission,’’ said Ludwig, 54, who also plays viola in the BSO. “First, this music was and remains unbelievable. Second, these are people whose lives, like so many victims of the Holocaust, were destroyed. But further, when their minds could have been on anything else, anything at all, like self-preservation, they found the will to continue their craft and continue to make and perform music in the worst possible circumstances. And that needs to be remembered.’’

From 1941 to 1945, Jewish artists found themselves packed into Terezin and forced to work factory jobs, making household items for the German economy. What the Nazis did not count on was the artists forming alliances and using their scant spare time to continue making music.

So prolific were the Terezin artists that they secretly performed late-night concerts for other prisoners while others stood watch for prison guards. The concerts were eventually discovered, but rather than put an end to them, Nazis decided they could use the concerts to ease international scrutiny and pressure over their treatment of Jews. They temporarily dressed up the ghetto and forced the Terezin artists to perform for International Red Cross observers in 1944. The occasion was filmed for a propaganda film that portrayed Terezin as some sort of utopia.

But when the Red Cross left, the cameras left, and the deportations from Terezin to the death camps resumed.

In all, 33,000 of Terezin’s 140,000 prisoners died of disease and starvation. Another 87,000 were sent to the death camps, and only 5 percent of that lot survived.