Ed Vulliamy talks to Anka Bergman, 96, her daughter, Eva Clarke, who was born in a Nazi camp, and other survivors about life in Terezín, the camp where a wealth of imprisoned Czech musical talent suffered and played
The music had ended for the evening, and few people dared speak. Although beautiful, it had been hard to take at times. Every piece on the programme had been written in the transit concentration camp of Terezín – which the Nazis called by its German name, Theresienstadt – an hour's drive from Prague. A grotesque and unique place within the history of the Holocaust, at any given time it housed 60,000 people, most of whom were transported to Auschwitz. Yet it was also where, famously and surreally, the remarkable musical and theatrical life of Czechoslovakia was permitted, defiantly, to thrive; where great music was composed and performed by those condemned.
And at this concert in London three years ago, an artist called Helga Weissová-Hošková, who had survived Terezín and Auschwitz, took the stage for discussion, and questions. At one point she was asked: "Were any babies born in Terezín?", and replied: "I do remember a baby born on the ramp at the concentration camp of Mauthausen, when we arrived by cattle train from Auschwitz. A German soldier went and found a doctor in the camp, I don't know why, or what happened to the baby." Silence followed, and a woman stood up and said, quite matter-of-factly: "Could I just say, I am that child."
We were in the Wigmore Hall, halfway through an epic weekend of music, film, poetry and artwork from Terezín organised by the great London-based chamber music group the Nash Ensemble; an event previewed in this newspaper that has since spawned many adventures and encounters. Ms Weissová-Hošková was introduced by the Nash's artistic director Amelia Freedman to an editor from Penguin, who commissioned the diaries Helga had kept as a child in Terezín, for publication this year – a major event, for such contemporary records (as opposed to memoirs) are rare.
The programme of music composed in Terezín, very seldom played, began a life of its own after Ms Freedman was invited to take it to New York for a Terezín festival. A CD of the music was released by the Nash last month, and next weekend comes the climax: a heart-stopping piece of history as they take the music "home", to Prague; to play in the Czech capital these great works written by Czech composers interned and doomed to the gas chambers; shoots of genius – and heralds of a great movement in modern music that never was.
The woman born on the Mauthausen ramp who rose from the audience to speak is Eva Clarke, 67. She lives in Cambridge with her mother, Anka Bergman, who is 96. Mrs Bergman knew the man who founded and conducted the principal orchestra in the camp: Karel Ancerl. Ancerl also survived Auschwitz and went on to become one of the greatest conductors and interpreters of music – some say the greatest – of his generation with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra.
How many of you know what a milliner is?" Eva Clarke asks students gathered in a hall at Long Road sixth-form college in Cambridge. No one raises a hand. "Well, I'm talking about a time when women wore hats, and my mother was apprenticed to a milliner, someone who made hats." Eva stands beneath a projection showing the gulag of concentration and death camps, for the latest in her tireless rounds of presentations on the Holocaust and her own family history. She talks about how her German Jewish father – who had been awarded an Iron Cross, First Class for valour in the service of the fatherland during the first world war – left his native Berlin, thinking Czechoslovakia to be safe: "It wasn't. But if he hadn't come he'd never have met my mother."
She tells them about the encroachment of measures against Jews, as backdrop to her parents' romance; of her mother being a film-lover "comfortable with the fact that she was a good looker", and shows a picture of the newlyweds smiling, wearing their yellow stars with "no idea what that would mean for them in the future".
Eva's father, Berndt Nathan, was "transported" to Terezín first, and Anka followed, taking with her a box of his favourite doughnuts. At the camp, which Anka called "this awful, crowded place", she was tasked to work in the kitchens, "therefore had access to food. That was life, the search for food." Men and women were rigidly segregated, yet Anka "managed to get pregnant", as Eva Clarke puts it. The baby died, but then Anka conceived a second time.
"Which was an extreme danger," says Eva. "Four other women had been forced to sign a document agreeing to surrender their babies once born, hearing for the first time a new word, 'euthanasia'." As well as which, there was this place: known in Terezín simply as "the East", to which people were unceasingly "transported", to disappear for ever. "Once in Auschwitz," says Eva, "to be pregnant was to be sent straight to the gas chambers."
Eva Clarke continues the story of her mother's survival, and her own birth, to a rapt young audience, after which we drive through late winter sun to Eva's home in Cambridge, to which her mother recently moved from Cardiff. Now it is 96-year-old Anka's turn to tell her story.
Anka recounts how she left Terezín for Auschwitz, "knowing I was pregnant, to follow my husband". She recalls asking the question, "among the brick chimneys: 'When will I see my parents?'", and the hollow mirth that greeted it among those in her berth. "'We'll all go up in smoke,' they replied. 'You'll never see them again.'" She became, she says, "thinner and thinner, while my stomach became bigger and bigger", and was transferred to a factory near Freiberg where V2 "buzzbombs" were manufactured, "and where we were delighted to find bedbugs, which meant food and warmth". Six months later, Anka was transported to Mauthausen on an open coal truck, where she went into labour. "You can carry on screaming," said one German soldier, but another seems to have taken pity and fetched a Jewish doctor from within the camp: "And I gave birth to a healthy girl. I was in Mauthausen, but I was also in heaven. I suppose I should believe in God, I have lived so many miracles, but I don't. He was not there." Mother and daughter escaped certain death only because when Anka arrived in Mauthausen at the end of April 1945, the approaching US army was so close the Nazis had dismantled the gas chambers. "The war was lost," says Anka, "but if we had arrived just a few days earlier we would not be here."
Anka tells also of "the most terrible moment of all", when the bedraggled survivors "returned to Prague, which we had once called home, like ghosts – begging even the fare for a tram". But members of her extended family had also survived, "and after we found the door, they welcomed us and treated us like gold". After the annexation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviets, Anka fled again with her second husband – to arrive as a refugee, "happy and lucky, in Cardiff".
But there had been this other story, back in Terezín, of which Anka Bergman also speaks: that of the music, which the Jews of Czechoslovakia, and thereafter all Europe, brought with them within the walls of the camp.
"Czechoslovakia had been the most culturally vibrant nation in Europe," recalls Anka. "Prague was on a level with Vienna, Berlin or Paris."
It is impossible to overstate the importance of music in Czechoslovakia between the wars, and the effervescence of culture in the Bohemian capital. "It was indescribable," recalls Anka. "When I came to this country, I realised what did not exist, and had existed then: music in the air, and a level of culture among the people you wouldn't get nowadays. Of course, you never expected to meet all these great musicians and composers: but suddenly there they were – in the camp. All these many gifted people in Terezín, putting their talents to work.
"It distracted us, to hear the performances," continues Anka. "It connected us to the lives we had lived, and lost. Looking back, it's amazing to think how much pleasure they gave to so many people, under the most horrific of circumstances."
Anka preferred traditional music, and "my favourite was The Bartered Bride [by Smetana] – our great Czech opera, and there were so many people there. It was a dress rehearsal, and the part of young Marenka was sung by a 48-year-old, very beautifully." Anka also attended a famous performance of Verdi's Requiem, conducted by Rafael Schächter and accompanied by him on a harmonium. "Every time he rehearsed the choir, more people had gone, transported East," she recalls, "but it was played, and when the music stopped, total silence. We were shattered – until the German officers started clapping in the front rows.
"At first the Germans thought they were being generous to the Jews, allowing us to play," says Anka. "Then they saw how wonderfully the music was played, and presumably had the idea to stage performances, and make films, for the outside world."
In 1943 the Nazis struck upon two entwined ideas. One was to stage Brundibár, a children's opera composed in 1941 by Hans Krása, invite a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross to see it, and let these distinguished guests be the judges of what they saw. The children sang, the orchestra played and the Red Cross was delighted, underwriting Terezín with its international authority and a clean bill of health. Within days, almost the entire cast of children had been shipped "East" to the gas chambers.
The second scheme was to produce a documentary entitled The Führer Gives a City to the Jews, for which Terezín was cleaned up and grotesque sequences filmed in which apparently happy inmates, in reality doomed to die, play football and cultivate market gardens. And of course there is music: the Terezín Orchestra plays, under the baton of its founder and conductor, Karel Ancerl. Here, his genius is exploited for a nauseating propaganda purpose – "but he could not do otherwise," recalls Anka. But she knew him differently, for who he really was, her memories both intimate and epic.
"I distributed milk in Terezín, and would see Ancerl with his wife and child," recalls Anka on the sofa in Cambridge, making this unimaginable history tangible. "I knew her from Prague – though not as well as I knew his second wife. And I knew him by name – he had begun to make his name as a conductor. So I would give them a bit extra, and more milk for the child, and we became the best of friends."
An actress named Zdenka Fantlova, now 91, also spoke at that weekend's events, and will do so again in Prague. Mrs Fantlova took the lead female role in a number of cabarets and plays in Terezín, and on 15 October 1944, aged 22, travelled with her mother and little sister in a cattle car to Auschwitz with the great composers themselves: Gideon Klein, Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krása, on what would be their last journey. Also with them was Rafael Schächter, who organised many of the concerts and accompanied on piano, and the brilliant young Ancerl.
Schächter produced a tin of sardines from his bag. "He was sitting opposite me," says Mrs Fantlova. "He took out his sardines and his last piece of bread. Sardines were a symbol; with sardines, you could buy cigarettes, anything – they were the highest currency on the black market. Now he put them in a dish, mixed them with bread and said: 'This will be my last supper.' I thought it seemed strange: how did he know what was to happen? But we got to Auschwitz and it was his last supper."
Upon arrival, Schächter, Ullmann, Krasa and Klein went first, directed straight to the gas chambers by Dr Josef Mengele himself, wielding his cane and directing the arrivals to either forced labour or immediate death with a flick of the thumb.
Then came Ancerl, and behind him, young Zdenka, her mother and sister. Ancerl was, says Mrs Fantlova, "right in front of us. We had walked from the train, and he was with his wife and child. He was carrying his son, who had been born in Terezín. Guards with dogs grabbed the child from him, pushed it to his wife and kicked him to the floor. Karel rose and dusted himself down. We walked for two miles or so, until we reached three SS officers, boots polished, badges like mirrors. The one in the middle I only later learned was Mengele. And without any emotion, casually, with a wave of his white glove, he sent Ancerl's wife and child to the left, and Karel to the right. We didn't know what it meant – and he disappeared into the crowd, looking back at them."
Then came Zdenka's turn. And there was Mengele. He motioned my mother to the left and she disappeared into the crowd. I did not wait, I grabbed my younger sister and joined the line to the right. "We were next up. Behind me were a young mother and her child, carrying a doll. She asked, 'Mama, will we be there soon?' 'Yes,' my mother said, 'very soon.' And the girl jumped for joy."
Seventy years later, Zdenka sits beside the window of a mansion block flat overlooking Hyde Park in London; by an extraordinary twist, a plaque on the building identifies it as the location where a plot was hatched by the exiled Czech underground to assassinate the Third Reich's emissary to Prague, Reinhard Heydrich in 1942.
A life force in herself, Mrs Fantlova has written her story in a memoir called The Tin Ring, after the gift her lover in Terezín, a boy called Arno, gave her as a token. Her narrative has now been adapted into a one-woman play, performed by a fine actress called Jane Arnfield.
Mrs Fantlova was eventually taken to Belsen and, after liberation, spent time in Sweden before moving in 1949 to Australia, "when it was an empty colony at the end of the world. What disturbed me was that the moon was on the wrong side of the sky, and I couldn't change that." There she pursued her career as an actress, and in 1956 Karel Ancerl visited Melbourne with the Czech Philharmonic. "I was in the front row," says Mrs Fantlova, "so now there was no iron curtain between us. And there he was, an elderly man with grey hair. I thought: 'No one can see what I can see: my last picture of this man, being separated from his wife and child by Josef Mengele.' He was now playing Dvorák's Ninth Symphony, and I was crying so much I had to leave, past all the people in the row."
However, "next morning, Karel came to see me. It was so wonderful, I almost cried again, but I didn't – we talked about music, we drank coffee, 12,000 miles from home and that last picture of him in my mind, from Auschwitz. I could hardly believe we were the same people as before, as in Terezín and Auschwitz. But of course we were. He could not stay with me long; he had to return to Prague, where, soon after, the Soviets invaded. He left for Canada then, and I never saw him again."
Ancerl had flourished as the builder, director and inspiration of the Czech Philharmonic to its standing among the greatest orchestras in the world during the 1960s and 70s. He became a leading interpreter of the mainstream repertoire – in particular the symphonies of Mahler and Shostakovich, and the concertos of Brahms – but also of his country's music, which he conducted with a poignancy, briskness, power and beauty that borders on the unbearable. I remember him giving a guest performance with the London Philharmonic Orchestra – not the Czech Phil, for sure, but to watch him conduct, having been told his story, was like no other experience in music. After the Soviet invasion of 1968 he had indeed left for Canada, and – an exile – never quite recovered the genius he displayed playing with his countrymen. He died in Toronto in 1973.
Listening to the new Nash CD, and earlier recordings of the Terezín works by the La Roche Quartet, the Pavel Haas Quartet of Prague (Haas died in Auschwitz in 1944) and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, one gets a very strong sense that not only were great composers murdered in gas chambers, but also that a whole greater than the sum of its parts was summarily eradicated: a distinctively Czech school of music – bursting with talent, energy, innovation, yearning and wit – poised to flourish and reinvent the national music in the world of postwar modernity.
Of course it never happened, but those few composers who did survive – mostly gentiles such as Bohuslav Martinu – offered a hint of what might have been but never was, with his extraordinary blend of Bohemian romance and modern rigour. However, the saplings of that truncated Prague Spring did very briefly grow, could be heard and were heard – en route to the gas chambers.
That this music might be played and heard now, championed and almost proselytised, has become the singular mission of Amelia Freedman, long-time director of music at the South Bank during its golden age as well as founder of the Nash Ensemble, which next year celebrates 50 years of music-making.
Like that of the Holocaust itself, the story of Terezín's music revealed itself only slowly over time – and was not widely known until Czech violinist Joza Karas published a book in 1985, Music in Terezín. "Incredibly, these composers were not known," says Freedman. Once enamoured of "the quality of this music, of the very best kind", she put herself to work, "researching not only the music but the story itself". She was struck above all by the children's drawings, and the filmed performance of Brundibár. "Of the 42 children who did those drawings, 40 went to the gas chambers. For the performance of Brundibár, the children sang so wonderfully before most went to Auschwitz, and it made me cry: the Germans knew what was going to happen to them but the Jews did not. I learned that Adolf Eichmann was in the audience, and so of course was the Red Cross, on that infamous occasion in its history."
We talk in her study piled with scores, records and old concert programmes, looking out across a garden in Hendon, north London. "We are dealing here with great music by a whole generation of Czech composers lost in one fell swoop, most of them in October 1944," she affirms. "Composers like Ullmann, who leaned towards the second Viennese school; Haas, who studied with Janácek – and others, like Erwin Schulhoff, who drew from both, a communist and a Jew, so he didn't stand a chance." (Schulhoff, encouraged as a child by the great Czech composer Antonín Dvorák himself, and enamoured of jazz and Dada, was not in Terezín but died in the Wülzburg camp in 1942.)
There is a twist to next weekend's event, however, says Freedman: "While the Germans have accepted their responsibilities admirably – and we will take the Terezín weekend to Berlin – this story is not so widely known in the Czech Republic. There is of course a core of people who are interested, and there are the families of the survivors. But officialdom is not particularly helpful, and there were problems with our original intentions to play this music in the camp itself – which the musicians will visit but sadly not to play. However, we will take this music back to the city whence it came, and it will be a huge thing to perform it there.
"I know it sounds odd," she concludes, "but I feel connected to these composers. Over that weekend, I felt their presence, and will do again in Prague – as though it might please them to know that their work is being heard."
Everyone," muses Mrs Fantlova, "has different reactions to the aftermath of that experience. If you take a hundred survivors, you get a hundred answers. For me, Terezín and Auschwitz were like a previous life. It is as if I had died and been born again. After the camps, this second life is simpler. It is without fear. As a survivor, you get to know yourself – who am I? How much can you take?" My memory is completely free – I do not lock it anywhere, but neither do I think about it. There is a safety valve which tells your brain, 'Don't dwell on that!' You cannot afford to dwell on it."
However, she says: "Sometimes it comes back at unexpected moments. I was standing at South Kensington underground station this winter, and a gust of cold wind crossed the platform. It suddenly reminded me of that cold. I felt myself slipping back, but stopped. 'Zdenka,' I told myself, 'this is not cold. You have a coat, and gloves.' I took a deep breath and I was not cold at all. I need to remind myself how bad it was. By comparison, life is easy."
The Nash Ensemble will perform music by Ullmann, Klein, Krása, Haas, Schulhoff and others at the Prague Conservatoire on Friday and Saturday. The Tin Ring: How I Cheated Death, by Zdenka Fantlova, is published by Northumbria Press. The adaptation for stage by Jane Arnfield will be performed at Summerhall, Edinburgh fringe festival, 2-26 August. Brundibár: Music by Composers in Theresienstadt, performed by the Nash Ensemble, is released on Hyperion Records Reported by guardian.co.uk 5 hours ago.
The music had ended for the evening, and few people dared speak. Although beautiful, it had been hard to take at times. Every piece on the programme had been written in the transit concentration camp of Terezín – which the Nazis called by its German name, Theresienstadt – an hour's drive from Prague. A grotesque and unique place within the history of the Holocaust, at any given time it housed 60,000 people, most of whom were transported to Auschwitz. Yet it was also where, famously and surreally, the remarkable musical and theatrical life of Czechoslovakia was permitted, defiantly, to thrive; where great music was composed and performed by those condemned.
And at this concert in London three years ago, an artist called Helga Weissová-Hošková, who had survived Terezín and Auschwitz, took the stage for discussion, and questions. At one point she was asked: "Were any babies born in Terezín?", and replied: "I do remember a baby born on the ramp at the concentration camp of Mauthausen, when we arrived by cattle train from Auschwitz. A German soldier went and found a doctor in the camp, I don't know why, or what happened to the baby." Silence followed, and a woman stood up and said, quite matter-of-factly: "Could I just say, I am that child."
We were in the Wigmore Hall, halfway through an epic weekend of music, film, poetry and artwork from Terezín organised by the great London-based chamber music group the Nash Ensemble; an event previewed in this newspaper that has since spawned many adventures and encounters. Ms Weissová-Hošková was introduced by the Nash's artistic director Amelia Freedman to an editor from Penguin, who commissioned the diaries Helga had kept as a child in Terezín, for publication this year – a major event, for such contemporary records (as opposed to memoirs) are rare.
The programme of music composed in Terezín, very seldom played, began a life of its own after Ms Freedman was invited to take it to New York for a Terezín festival. A CD of the music was released by the Nash last month, and next weekend comes the climax: a heart-stopping piece of history as they take the music "home", to Prague; to play in the Czech capital these great works written by Czech composers interned and doomed to the gas chambers; shoots of genius – and heralds of a great movement in modern music that never was.
The woman born on the Mauthausen ramp who rose from the audience to speak is Eva Clarke, 67. She lives in Cambridge with her mother, Anka Bergman, who is 96. Mrs Bergman knew the man who founded and conducted the principal orchestra in the camp: Karel Ancerl. Ancerl also survived Auschwitz and went on to become one of the greatest conductors and interpreters of music – some say the greatest – of his generation with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra.
How many of you know what a milliner is?" Eva Clarke asks students gathered in a hall at Long Road sixth-form college in Cambridge. No one raises a hand. "Well, I'm talking about a time when women wore hats, and my mother was apprenticed to a milliner, someone who made hats." Eva stands beneath a projection showing the gulag of concentration and death camps, for the latest in her tireless rounds of presentations on the Holocaust and her own family history. She talks about how her German Jewish father – who had been awarded an Iron Cross, First Class for valour in the service of the fatherland during the first world war – left his native Berlin, thinking Czechoslovakia to be safe: "It wasn't. But if he hadn't come he'd never have met my mother."
She tells them about the encroachment of measures against Jews, as backdrop to her parents' romance; of her mother being a film-lover "comfortable with the fact that she was a good looker", and shows a picture of the newlyweds smiling, wearing their yellow stars with "no idea what that would mean for them in the future".
Eva's father, Berndt Nathan, was "transported" to Terezín first, and Anka followed, taking with her a box of his favourite doughnuts. At the camp, which Anka called "this awful, crowded place", she was tasked to work in the kitchens, "therefore had access to food. That was life, the search for food." Men and women were rigidly segregated, yet Anka "managed to get pregnant", as Eva Clarke puts it. The baby died, but then Anka conceived a second time.
"Which was an extreme danger," says Eva. "Four other women had been forced to sign a document agreeing to surrender their babies once born, hearing for the first time a new word, 'euthanasia'." As well as which, there was this place: known in Terezín simply as "the East", to which people were unceasingly "transported", to disappear for ever. "Once in Auschwitz," says Eva, "to be pregnant was to be sent straight to the gas chambers."
Eva Clarke continues the story of her mother's survival, and her own birth, to a rapt young audience, after which we drive through late winter sun to Eva's home in Cambridge, to which her mother recently moved from Cardiff. Now it is 96-year-old Anka's turn to tell her story.
Anka recounts how she left Terezín for Auschwitz, "knowing I was pregnant, to follow my husband". She recalls asking the question, "among the brick chimneys: 'When will I see my parents?'", and the hollow mirth that greeted it among those in her berth. "'We'll all go up in smoke,' they replied. 'You'll never see them again.'" She became, she says, "thinner and thinner, while my stomach became bigger and bigger", and was transferred to a factory near Freiberg where V2 "buzzbombs" were manufactured, "and where we were delighted to find bedbugs, which meant food and warmth". Six months later, Anka was transported to Mauthausen on an open coal truck, where she went into labour. "You can carry on screaming," said one German soldier, but another seems to have taken pity and fetched a Jewish doctor from within the camp: "And I gave birth to a healthy girl. I was in Mauthausen, but I was also in heaven. I suppose I should believe in God, I have lived so many miracles, but I don't. He was not there." Mother and daughter escaped certain death only because when Anka arrived in Mauthausen at the end of April 1945, the approaching US army was so close the Nazis had dismantled the gas chambers. "The war was lost," says Anka, "but if we had arrived just a few days earlier we would not be here."
Anka tells also of "the most terrible moment of all", when the bedraggled survivors "returned to Prague, which we had once called home, like ghosts – begging even the fare for a tram". But members of her extended family had also survived, "and after we found the door, they welcomed us and treated us like gold". After the annexation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviets, Anka fled again with her second husband – to arrive as a refugee, "happy and lucky, in Cardiff".
But there had been this other story, back in Terezín, of which Anka Bergman also speaks: that of the music, which the Jews of Czechoslovakia, and thereafter all Europe, brought with them within the walls of the camp.
"Czechoslovakia had been the most culturally vibrant nation in Europe," recalls Anka. "Prague was on a level with Vienna, Berlin or Paris."
It is impossible to overstate the importance of music in Czechoslovakia between the wars, and the effervescence of culture in the Bohemian capital. "It was indescribable," recalls Anka. "When I came to this country, I realised what did not exist, and had existed then: music in the air, and a level of culture among the people you wouldn't get nowadays. Of course, you never expected to meet all these great musicians and composers: but suddenly there they were – in the camp. All these many gifted people in Terezín, putting their talents to work.
"It distracted us, to hear the performances," continues Anka. "It connected us to the lives we had lived, and lost. Looking back, it's amazing to think how much pleasure they gave to so many people, under the most horrific of circumstances."
Anka preferred traditional music, and "my favourite was The Bartered Bride [by Smetana] – our great Czech opera, and there were so many people there. It was a dress rehearsal, and the part of young Marenka was sung by a 48-year-old, very beautifully." Anka also attended a famous performance of Verdi's Requiem, conducted by Rafael Schächter and accompanied by him on a harmonium. "Every time he rehearsed the choir, more people had gone, transported East," she recalls, "but it was played, and when the music stopped, total silence. We were shattered – until the German officers started clapping in the front rows.
"At first the Germans thought they were being generous to the Jews, allowing us to play," says Anka. "Then they saw how wonderfully the music was played, and presumably had the idea to stage performances, and make films, for the outside world."
In 1943 the Nazis struck upon two entwined ideas. One was to stage Brundibár, a children's opera composed in 1941 by Hans Krása, invite a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross to see it, and let these distinguished guests be the judges of what they saw. The children sang, the orchestra played and the Red Cross was delighted, underwriting Terezín with its international authority and a clean bill of health. Within days, almost the entire cast of children had been shipped "East" to the gas chambers.
The second scheme was to produce a documentary entitled The Führer Gives a City to the Jews, for which Terezín was cleaned up and grotesque sequences filmed in which apparently happy inmates, in reality doomed to die, play football and cultivate market gardens. And of course there is music: the Terezín Orchestra plays, under the baton of its founder and conductor, Karel Ancerl. Here, his genius is exploited for a nauseating propaganda purpose – "but he could not do otherwise," recalls Anka. But she knew him differently, for who he really was, her memories both intimate and epic.
"I distributed milk in Terezín, and would see Ancerl with his wife and child," recalls Anka on the sofa in Cambridge, making this unimaginable history tangible. "I knew her from Prague – though not as well as I knew his second wife. And I knew him by name – he had begun to make his name as a conductor. So I would give them a bit extra, and more milk for the child, and we became the best of friends."
An actress named Zdenka Fantlova, now 91, also spoke at that weekend's events, and will do so again in Prague. Mrs Fantlova took the lead female role in a number of cabarets and plays in Terezín, and on 15 October 1944, aged 22, travelled with her mother and little sister in a cattle car to Auschwitz with the great composers themselves: Gideon Klein, Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krása, on what would be their last journey. Also with them was Rafael Schächter, who organised many of the concerts and accompanied on piano, and the brilliant young Ancerl.
Schächter produced a tin of sardines from his bag. "He was sitting opposite me," says Mrs Fantlova. "He took out his sardines and his last piece of bread. Sardines were a symbol; with sardines, you could buy cigarettes, anything – they were the highest currency on the black market. Now he put them in a dish, mixed them with bread and said: 'This will be my last supper.' I thought it seemed strange: how did he know what was to happen? But we got to Auschwitz and it was his last supper."
Upon arrival, Schächter, Ullmann, Krasa and Klein went first, directed straight to the gas chambers by Dr Josef Mengele himself, wielding his cane and directing the arrivals to either forced labour or immediate death with a flick of the thumb.
Then came Ancerl, and behind him, young Zdenka, her mother and sister. Ancerl was, says Mrs Fantlova, "right in front of us. We had walked from the train, and he was with his wife and child. He was carrying his son, who had been born in Terezín. Guards with dogs grabbed the child from him, pushed it to his wife and kicked him to the floor. Karel rose and dusted himself down. We walked for two miles or so, until we reached three SS officers, boots polished, badges like mirrors. The one in the middle I only later learned was Mengele. And without any emotion, casually, with a wave of his white glove, he sent Ancerl's wife and child to the left, and Karel to the right. We didn't know what it meant – and he disappeared into the crowd, looking back at them."
Then came Zdenka's turn. And there was Mengele. He motioned my mother to the left and she disappeared into the crowd. I did not wait, I grabbed my younger sister and joined the line to the right. "We were next up. Behind me were a young mother and her child, carrying a doll. She asked, 'Mama, will we be there soon?' 'Yes,' my mother said, 'very soon.' And the girl jumped for joy."
Seventy years later, Zdenka sits beside the window of a mansion block flat overlooking Hyde Park in London; by an extraordinary twist, a plaque on the building identifies it as the location where a plot was hatched by the exiled Czech underground to assassinate the Third Reich's emissary to Prague, Reinhard Heydrich in 1942.
A life force in herself, Mrs Fantlova has written her story in a memoir called The Tin Ring, after the gift her lover in Terezín, a boy called Arno, gave her as a token. Her narrative has now been adapted into a one-woman play, performed by a fine actress called Jane Arnfield.
Mrs Fantlova was eventually taken to Belsen and, after liberation, spent time in Sweden before moving in 1949 to Australia, "when it was an empty colony at the end of the world. What disturbed me was that the moon was on the wrong side of the sky, and I couldn't change that." There she pursued her career as an actress, and in 1956 Karel Ancerl visited Melbourne with the Czech Philharmonic. "I was in the front row," says Mrs Fantlova, "so now there was no iron curtain between us. And there he was, an elderly man with grey hair. I thought: 'No one can see what I can see: my last picture of this man, being separated from his wife and child by Josef Mengele.' He was now playing Dvorák's Ninth Symphony, and I was crying so much I had to leave, past all the people in the row."
However, "next morning, Karel came to see me. It was so wonderful, I almost cried again, but I didn't – we talked about music, we drank coffee, 12,000 miles from home and that last picture of him in my mind, from Auschwitz. I could hardly believe we were the same people as before, as in Terezín and Auschwitz. But of course we were. He could not stay with me long; he had to return to Prague, where, soon after, the Soviets invaded. He left for Canada then, and I never saw him again."
Ancerl had flourished as the builder, director and inspiration of the Czech Philharmonic to its standing among the greatest orchestras in the world during the 1960s and 70s. He became a leading interpreter of the mainstream repertoire – in particular the symphonies of Mahler and Shostakovich, and the concertos of Brahms – but also of his country's music, which he conducted with a poignancy, briskness, power and beauty that borders on the unbearable. I remember him giving a guest performance with the London Philharmonic Orchestra – not the Czech Phil, for sure, but to watch him conduct, having been told his story, was like no other experience in music. After the Soviet invasion of 1968 he had indeed left for Canada, and – an exile – never quite recovered the genius he displayed playing with his countrymen. He died in Toronto in 1973.
Listening to the new Nash CD, and earlier recordings of the Terezín works by the La Roche Quartet, the Pavel Haas Quartet of Prague (Haas died in Auschwitz in 1944) and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, one gets a very strong sense that not only were great composers murdered in gas chambers, but also that a whole greater than the sum of its parts was summarily eradicated: a distinctively Czech school of music – bursting with talent, energy, innovation, yearning and wit – poised to flourish and reinvent the national music in the world of postwar modernity.
Of course it never happened, but those few composers who did survive – mostly gentiles such as Bohuslav Martinu – offered a hint of what might have been but never was, with his extraordinary blend of Bohemian romance and modern rigour. However, the saplings of that truncated Prague Spring did very briefly grow, could be heard and were heard – en route to the gas chambers.
That this music might be played and heard now, championed and almost proselytised, has become the singular mission of Amelia Freedman, long-time director of music at the South Bank during its golden age as well as founder of the Nash Ensemble, which next year celebrates 50 years of music-making.
Like that of the Holocaust itself, the story of Terezín's music revealed itself only slowly over time – and was not widely known until Czech violinist Joza Karas published a book in 1985, Music in Terezín. "Incredibly, these composers were not known," says Freedman. Once enamoured of "the quality of this music, of the very best kind", she put herself to work, "researching not only the music but the story itself". She was struck above all by the children's drawings, and the filmed performance of Brundibár. "Of the 42 children who did those drawings, 40 went to the gas chambers. For the performance of Brundibár, the children sang so wonderfully before most went to Auschwitz, and it made me cry: the Germans knew what was going to happen to them but the Jews did not. I learned that Adolf Eichmann was in the audience, and so of course was the Red Cross, on that infamous occasion in its history."
We talk in her study piled with scores, records and old concert programmes, looking out across a garden in Hendon, north London. "We are dealing here with great music by a whole generation of Czech composers lost in one fell swoop, most of them in October 1944," she affirms. "Composers like Ullmann, who leaned towards the second Viennese school; Haas, who studied with Janácek – and others, like Erwin Schulhoff, who drew from both, a communist and a Jew, so he didn't stand a chance." (Schulhoff, encouraged as a child by the great Czech composer Antonín Dvorák himself, and enamoured of jazz and Dada, was not in Terezín but died in the Wülzburg camp in 1942.)
There is a twist to next weekend's event, however, says Freedman: "While the Germans have accepted their responsibilities admirably – and we will take the Terezín weekend to Berlin – this story is not so widely known in the Czech Republic. There is of course a core of people who are interested, and there are the families of the survivors. But officialdom is not particularly helpful, and there were problems with our original intentions to play this music in the camp itself – which the musicians will visit but sadly not to play. However, we will take this music back to the city whence it came, and it will be a huge thing to perform it there.
"I know it sounds odd," she concludes, "but I feel connected to these composers. Over that weekend, I felt their presence, and will do again in Prague – as though it might please them to know that their work is being heard."
Everyone," muses Mrs Fantlova, "has different reactions to the aftermath of that experience. If you take a hundred survivors, you get a hundred answers. For me, Terezín and Auschwitz were like a previous life. It is as if I had died and been born again. After the camps, this second life is simpler. It is without fear. As a survivor, you get to know yourself – who am I? How much can you take?" My memory is completely free – I do not lock it anywhere, but neither do I think about it. There is a safety valve which tells your brain, 'Don't dwell on that!' You cannot afford to dwell on it."
However, she says: "Sometimes it comes back at unexpected moments. I was standing at South Kensington underground station this winter, and a gust of cold wind crossed the platform. It suddenly reminded me of that cold. I felt myself slipping back, but stopped. 'Zdenka,' I told myself, 'this is not cold. You have a coat, and gloves.' I took a deep breath and I was not cold at all. I need to remind myself how bad it was. By comparison, life is easy."
The Nash Ensemble will perform music by Ullmann, Klein, Krása, Haas, Schulhoff and others at the Prague Conservatoire on Friday and Saturday. The Tin Ring: How I Cheated Death, by Zdenka Fantlova, is published by Northumbria Press. The adaptation for stage by Jane Arnfield will be performed at Summerhall, Edinburgh fringe festival, 2-26 August. Brundibár: Music by Composers in Theresienstadt, performed by the Nash Ensemble, is released on Hyperion Records Reported by guardian.co.uk 5 hours ago.