Hours of Freedom: The Story of the Terezín Composer

The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau—as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this annual day of commemoration, the UN urges every member state to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism, and to develop educational programs to help prevent future genocides. Below are two programs that may interest you.

Holocaust Center Seattle and The Defiant Requiem Foundation present Hours of Freedom: The Story of the Terezín Composer. This program highlights music by composers who continued to write new music while imprisoned in the Theresienstadt (Terezín) Concentration Camp during World War II. Aware that their lives were fragile, and that deportations to the east were a constant reality, Hours of Freedom explores their need to create this new music as affirmation of a future. Featuring works that miraculously survived, Hours of Freedom is presented as chapters with titles including “The Eyewitness,” “Fate,” “The Broken Heart,” and “The Messenger.” While some of the compositions reflect personal eyewitness accounts of the agony and suffering in Terezín, others express the assurance of a return to life as it was before the war.

The program is one hour in length, and includes recorded musical performances with live commentary from Murry Sidlin, Conductor, and President and Artistic Director of The Defiant Requiem Foundation. The program will be followed by a talk-back and Q&A with Maestro Sidlin. This program is made possible thanks to the generous support of Arlene Ehrlich.

Register here.

Questions? Please e-mail Ilana Cone Kennedy, Chief Operating Officer, Holocaust Center Seattle: ilana@HolocaustCenterSeattle.org.