Holocaust belongs to the adverse milestones that must not be forgotten. Czech Centers organize various events to remember its victims. Czech Center New York will stream concert called "A Tribute to the Artists Who Perished in the Holocaust" on this occasion.
Czech Center New York, on behalf of EUNIC New York, the Consulate General of the Czech Republic in New York and the Permanent Mission of the Czech Republic to the United Nations in New York organizes special event of remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust.
“A Tribute to the Artists who Perished in the Holocaust” is a multimedia event that premiered with great success at the Center for Jewish History last fall. The partners of the project are The Mannes Sounds Festival, Mannes School of Music The New School, the American Society for Jewish Music, the Leo Baeck Institute, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and the Center for Jewish History.
The music played during the concert comes from prominent composers, who were murdered, some at a very early age, in the Nazi concentration camps. Some of the music was composed while the artists were interned in the Terezín Ghetto before being sent, by rail transport, to their deaths at Auschwitz and other concentration camps. How tragic that their lives were cut so short! We can only imagine how much more great music they might have composed had the Holocaust never occurred.
A significant part of the program is centered around the life of the extraordinarily talented Czech boy, Petr Ginz, a writer and artist who was deported to Terezín at fourteen and gassed in Auschwitz two years later. You can see a short excerpt from the film “The Last Flight of Petr Ginz”, a video made for us by the film director Sandra Dickson, with music by the American composer John Califra. Also included is a video message from Israel, by the Holocaust survivor and artist Chava Pressburger (Eva Ginzová), sister of Petr Ginz.
The program will conclude with John Califra’s contemporary chamber opera, “Echoes from the Darkness: Messages from the Terezín’s Diaries of Petr and Eva Ginz” which was written for the Kristallnacht event of the Mannes Sounds Festival and had its world premiere on November 9th, 2021.
