Author: Oberon
I’ve finally had an opportunity to watch the film DEFIANT REQUIEM, the story of performances of the Verdi MESSA DA REQUIEM that took place at Terezín during the darkest days of the Holocaust. I expected to be moved – deeply – but the effects of watching the film were truly profound.
The ghetto at Terezín occupied an old fortress, ironically built in the shape of a six-pointed star. By 1943 it housed 60,000 Jews, roughly ten times the number the space might be reasonably thought to accommodate. There was little food, and no hope. Trains left Terezín on a regular schedule, carrying prisoners to their ultimate doom at Auschwitz.
In the dire living conditions of Terezín, one man had a vision: composer and conductor Rafael Schächter drew together a chorus from the many the singers who lived in the ghetto. Late at night, these musicians gathered around an old, abandoned upright piano which Schächter had discovered to learn Verdi’s MESSA DA REQUIEM. Schächter led more than a dozen performances of the REQUIEM over time at Terezín, but for each presentation, new choristers had to be found and trained to replaced those who had vanished into the cattle cars heading East.
In the Spring of 1944, the inmates of Terezín were suddenly assigned to new work details; their job: to spruce up the camp and make it look like a normal, thriving town. Fresh clothes were distributed, and suddenly food became more abundant. The reason for all this became evident when the SS brought in film crews, along with representatives from the International Red Cross, to show that the Jews were were being well-treated. The ruse worked.
As part of this deception, Rafael Schächter was ordered to gather his chorus together and give a performance of the REQUIEM for the visitors. This time, the singers privately relished the Mass’s prophesy of the Die Irae (‘Day of Wrath’) – the coming of Judgement Day – hurling the Latin words into the unsuspecting faces of their captors. And these lines from the Liber Scriptus stand yet as a warning to all oppressors:
“A written book will be brought forth,
which contains everything
for which the world will be judged.
Therefore when the Judge takes His seat,
whatever is hidden will be revealed:
nothing shall remain un-avenged.”
The date of the Red Cross visit to Terezín – June 23rd,1944 – apparently marked the last time the REQUIEM was sung in the ghetto. Soon after, the transports to Auschwitz were resumed, and Rafael Schächter and most of his chorus went to meet their fate.
Some seventy years later, conductor Murry Sidlin paid tribute to Rafael Schächter and honored all the lives lost or damaged during the Holocaust by leading a performance of the Verdi REQUIEM at Terezín. Since then, the DEFIANT REQUIEM has been performed worldwide more that 40 times.
The DVD tells the sad tale of Terezín, and of Raphael Schächter’s development of the defiant REQUIEM against all odds. It also features excepts from the Sidlin “revival” and interviews with some of the few survivors who sang in Schächters’ choir.
One of the many stories we hear is that of Edgar Krasa (above, as a young man), a cook and welder who was Schächter’s bunk-mate in the ghetto. Krasa sang in all sixteen REQUIEM performances that Schächter led at Terezín; he was later shipped to Auschwitz and, in January 1945, miraculously escaped while on a death march. Krasa met and married his wife Hana in 1949; though they had both been at Terezín at the same time, they had never met while there. Edgar Krasa died in 2017.
Edgar and Hana Krasa (Matthew Lutch photo, above) were guests of honor at Murry Sidlin’s Terezín performance of the REQUIEM…
…and both of their sons (above, with Edgar) sang in the chorus.
For me, the most touching moments in the film come when Murry Sidlin summons his chorus to the very subterranean chamber where Raphael Schächter held his secret rehearsals. Packed into the small space, the singers – many of them very young – sing the Requiem Aeternam. They sing thru their tears.
Oberon's Glade 