Bor, Josef Kani. The Terezin Requiem. Translated by Edith Pargeter. New York: Avon, 1963.uk,
Joseph Bor before the war, was a leading lawyer and a leader of Jews in Czechoslovakia. When Heydrich was assassinated, German reprisal was swift and a mass deportation of Jews including all of Bor’s family, were deported to a newly established Nazi concentration camp at Terezin (known best as Theresienstadt. Of Bor’s entire family, he was the only survivor – to survive Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald as well .Bor wrote his first autobiographical work when he was over 50 years old, called “The Abandoned Doll”. Later at the urging of fellow prisoner survivors, he wrote The Terezin -Requiem. He pays homage to a talented young conductor, Raphael Schachter and the nameless 500 other artists who helped him to perform Verdi’s Requiem.
It is supremely ironic that this Jewish conductor an “unbeliever” would choose to conduct Verdi’s Requiem in the Terezin ghetto: – an Italian music with a Latin text, Catholic prayers, Jewish singers and musicians from all parts of Eastern Europe including Poland and Hungary, Austria and Germany.
Pag 10. The conductor asks himself, “what would prayer for the dead mean to prisoners in a concentration camp?... and for whom were the prisoners to pray? An old beggar comes to see the conductor – he shivers at the thought of a Jew and a Requiem…..but it’s not the Jew that bothers him, but the Requiem…because its understanding/success depended on faith not art! .
Page 12-14. The beggar yells at the conductor and spews forth the following invective:
Your Jew is a fool. He believes in a better life here on earth, he expects a just reward and just punishment here in this life, and if he can't attain Justice, then he believes, incorrigible optimist that he is, that his son will attain it, or his grandson or at least his great-grandson. And your Catholic is a still greater fool. He hopes for final Justice in another world. He consoles himself with the thought that someday the time will come when all man we rise from the dead and parade before the Judgment seat of God. And that Catholic melody of his has a quite specific Counterpoint, and they call it hell! How can a Jew set out to perform the Requiem when he's never gone in fear of hell and never believed in it? When it's never even occurred to him to imagine such a thing as the kingdom of the devil?
And that was the moment when Schachter realized what it was but he has never yet been able to grasp. The old man was right. For today a man can imagine the torments of the Damned better than Dante ever could, and a Jew writhing in the talons of the Nazis knows hell in all its horror, here among the living.
Schachter realized that the Requiem he would study here must not be a Christian, that would not help anyone in this place. It must be a new a different kind of requiem, with a fantastic with a fanatical face in historical Justice here in this world. Only such a wreck because they sing here in a concentration camp, only start music with prisoners comprehend, Jews, Christians, and unbelievers alike. He would perform for them a Requiem that had never yet been heard.
In the end, the Requiem performance is given in front of Eichman and the camp Commandant and other SS.
Page 97. Eichman is astonished that Jews would singing the Requiem in Terezin…He finds the concept astoundingly funny as he’s sure the Jews do NOT understand that they would be singing for their own death knell… At the end of the Requiem, the last quivers of the song are “Libera nos! Libera nos!
Page 112. Eichmann’s response was “Interesting, very interesting!... Unique. I’ve never before heard such a performance of the Requiem. Eichman applauded and … that was the signal for the SS. Applause rang throughout the hall.
Page 112. The story ends with the following paragraph:
The summer drew to its close, and the time of the transports began again. The Commander has promised that Schachter's company would not be separated. The promise was kept. All together they ascended into the first wagons of the first transport.
