The Terezín Requiem by Josef Bor

First published:Terezínské rekviem, 1963 (English translation, 1963)

Type of work: Historical fiction

Principal characters:

• Raphael Schachter, a sensitive orchestra conductor
• The Old Beggar, a lover of music and Schachter’s adviser in preparing the Requiem, also known as “The Court Councilor”
• Francis, a tenor and a Jewish cantor
• Annemarie (Maruska), a Bavarian soprano
• Elizabeth, a formerly famous mezzo-soprano
• Elizabeth’s husband, crippled during the “Night of Broken Glass”
• Meisl, a cellist
• Josef, a bass
• Betka, a mezzo-soprano who replaces Elizabeth
• Mephistopheles, a chimney sweep, a bass who replaces Josef
• Roderich, a cantor’s son and a tenor, one-quarter German, formerly in the German army
• Haindl, a Schutzstaffel (SS) officer
• The camp commandant
• Adolf Eichmann, (1906-1962), chief architect of the “final solution”

Overview

In the summer of 1944, as the German army begins to suffer shattering defeats, Adolf Eichmann converts the Terezín ghetto, in central Europe, into a disguised assembly camp for the newly constructed Birkenau extermination camp. Among the Jews at Terezín is Raphael Schachter, a brilliant young conductor who decides to embark on a study of the Giuseppe Verdi Requiem. Schachter is attracted to the project by the incredible availability of talent at Terezín, where the Nazis have assembled thousands of artists to promote the image of Hitler’s “model” camp. He is also drawn to the Requiem as a prayer for the dead that may comfort the prisoners of the concentration camp and help him answer profound questions about the meaning of life and death for Jews under Nazi rule.

Coached by a half-deaf, old beggar (who later turns out to be a musical genius), Schachter begins to assemble his choir and soloists. Chief among them are Francis, a cantor from Galacia who sings tenor; Maruska, a delicate soprano who has witnessed unspeakable Nazi atrocities; and Elizabeth, a famous mezzo-soprano whose crippled husband is the choir’s first audience.

Because the Nazis are concealing the actual purpose of Terezín, they lead Schachter and his musicians to believe that they will be secure there. Nazi officials provide sheet music and instruments, confiscated from Jews all over Europe. They remove all the inhabitants of the local hospital and turn it into a rehearsal hall. They reassure all the musicians that they will not be separated. The performers rejoice in the hope that they will be spared the fate of their fellow Jews in the camps.

This confidence is shattered when the injured and disabled who have been evacuated from the hospital are taken away, and their relatives in the choir follow them to their doom. Schachter must start assembling musicians all over again. New soloists miraculously appear, including Roderich, the son of a Jewish father and a Roman Catholic mother who unknowingly sent him to Terezín for his own protection when the German army drafted him. Roderich finds the choir rehearsing while he is running away from Haindl, a particularly vicious Schutzstaffel (SS) officer whom he has insulted and actually struck. Haindl cannot find his victim as Roderich blends into the choir, and Schachter is delighted to have found a tenor who can replace the departed Francis. On the eve of the performance, however, Roderich appears again, distraught with fear. This time he cannot escape Haindl and the torture and death he knows await him. He asks Schachter to lead the choir in one last chorus for his sake and sings his solo in a trembling voice—his own farewell to his friends and fellow Jews.

At last Schachter succeeds in assembling a company of singers, and the premiere of the Requiem takes place before an audience of Jewish inmates. Eichmann himself arrives to inspect the camp, and the commandant summons a performance for the Nazi officials. Schachter’s final gesture of defiance is to alter the last bars of the Requiem, “Libera Me,” from Verdi’s original soft whisper to a thundering drum roll, proclaiming the Jews’ powerful longing for freedom. It is the last performance for Schachter and his musicians. The Nazi command keeps its promise not to separate the Requiem performers, and they are all led away to the ovens together.

The overwhelming theme of The Terezín Requiem is the search for meaning in a world of unspeakable evil. Schachter ponders the purpose of his enterprise as he coaches the soloists in the various parts of the Requiem, always interpreting Verdi’s prayers for the dead as pleas for his fellow victims. The final cry, “Libera Me,” becomes a call for freedom, not only from the terrors of hell but also from the earthly hell of the death camps.

Schachter, as Bor’s voice, is also preoccupied with expressing the meaning of Judaism as a means for understanding good and evil. He chooses the Requiem as an attack on Hitler’s ideas of pure and impure blood—“Italian music with a Latin text, Catholic prayers, Jewish singers . . . studied and directed by an unbeliever.” Yet it soon becomes apparent to Schachter that Verdi’s Catholic sensibilities must be reinterpreted to make the Requiem meaningful to a Jewish audience. Jewish theology teaches that good and evil, rewards and punishments, take place here on earth, among the living. Verdi’s Catholic concept of eternal retribution, as described in the “Dies Irae” portion of the Requiem, no longer means a Day of Wrath at the Last Judgment, but God’s righteous anger, which is already sweeping over the Nazi empire in Europe and will exact historical justice in this world. Hell is no longer an otherworldly region to be feared after death; rather, it is the living hell that is the camps.

Finally, The Terezín Requiem explores the question of how the powerless may respond to evil. Even at Terezín, where death is always waiting, Schachter and his musicians create meaning through their art. Roderich, the tenor, chooses to sing a last verse with the choir when he finds out that he is to be tortured and killed. Schachter himself rewrites the last verse of the Requiem to remind his listeners and his fellow inmates that they have not forgotten their desire for freedom. The Terezín Requiem is a reminder that human beings matter even in the shadow of certain death.

Josef Bor, himself a survivor of three death camps, wrote The Terezín Requiem as a tribute to the five hundred Terezín musicians who did not live to tell their stories. As Israel Knox points out in the introduction to An Anthology of Holocaust Literature (1968), in which part of The Terezín Requiem is reprinted, the books of the Six Million are “a sort of cemetery,” and in reading them “we are reciting Kaddish [the Jewish prayer for the dead] for those who left none to say it for them.”

Like other Holocaust memoirs—Elie Wiesel’s Un di Velt hot geshvign (1956; La Nuit, 1958; Night, 1960), Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (1947; If This Is a Man, 1959; revised as Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, 1961), Fania Fénelon’s Sursis pour l’orchestre (1976; Playing for Time, 1977)—Bor’s book makes the unthinkable real by telling the story of a small group of people whom the reader comes to know as individuals. Studied in a history book, the sheer magnitude of the Holocaust may seem unreal, but in the story of Raphael Schachter, the reader encounters a vivid character with feelings and aspirations. As Schachter and the others meditate on the meaning of evil, the existence of God, and the nature of history, they become real people who can be believed, admired, and mourned.

Although it was not written primarily for adolescents, The Terezín Requiem is one of a small number of Holocaust memoirs that can be read and appreciated by young people whose only knowledge of the Holocaust comes from history books. The issue of appropriateness is an especially difficult one where Holocaust literature is concerned. Young readers may not be developmentally ready for graphic descriptions of torture and crematoria; yet, it is essential that they learn about the camps and ovens as they really were. Bor’s book is a good choice for the mature young adult reader; although the horrors are suggested, the focus of the novel is on the humanity of Schachter and his musicians. The book is tragic, even shocking, but never grotesque.

Critics have debated the value of historical memoirs over fictional accounts of the Holocaust, and some have concluded that, in this particular case, history is so powerful that it is a profanation to fictionalize it. Bor’s book partakes of both approaches, starting with real characters known to the author and embellishing with details to bring the story to life. Like Viktor Emil Frankl’s powerful memoir Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager (1946; From Death-Camp to Existentialism: A Psychiatrist’s Path to a New Therapy, 1959; revised and enlarged as Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, 1962), The Terezín Requiem ultimately celebrates the greatness of the human spirit—that a prisoner could compose a work such as Verdi’s Requiem and sing it in the midst of unfathomable evil. Most of all, in memorializing Schachter, Bor has created his own Requiem, not only for the Terezín musicians but also for all those who perished without graves in the ovens of the Holocaust.

Sources for Further Study

Calamai, Peter. “Literary Obituaries Great Reads.” Ottawa Citizen, March 2, 1996, p. B6.

De Silva, Cara, ed. In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezín. Translated by Bianca Steiner Brown. Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1996.

Friesová, Jana Renée. Fortress of My Youth: Memoir of a Terezín Survivor. Translated by Elinor Morrisby and Ladislav Rosendorf. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.

Redlich, Gonda. The Terezin Diary of Gonda Redlich. Edited by Saul S. Friedman, translated by Laurence Kutler. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992.

Sicher, Efraim, ed. Holocaust Novelists. Vol. 299 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 2004.

Sullivan, Edward T. The Holocaust in Literature for Youth: A Guide and Resource Book. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1999.