Washington Children's Opera Camp Gives a Different Perspective to Tragedy of Holocaust

By Darien Bates

It was 61 years ago when Ella Weissberger, a child prisoner of the Terezin ghetto in Czechoslovakia, performed in Hans Krasa’s children’s opera “Brundibar” for an audience of fellow prisoners and camp guards. At the time, as the ravages of World War II reached their peak and millions of Jews, Poles, gypsies, Slavs and others were dying in imprisonment around Europe, Weissberger and the other children at their camp found in the simple story a little comfort to help them cope.

That opera, “Brundibar,” whose songs were once a lifeline for Weissberger and many of the prisoners living at Terezin, is now a production by The Washington National Opera’s Opera Camp for Kids, offering a unique perspective into the Holocaust tragedy for performers and audiences, alike.

In its 11th year, the Washington National Opera’s “Opera Camp for Kids” summer program introduces middle school students to classical music performance while simultaneously focusing on themes that hold particular relevance for students on the verge of entering adulthood.

Last year, for example, the production of “Enchantment of Dreams” was about discovering and appreciating one’s gifts. Along with classes in vocal technique and physical performance, students also addressed issues about cultivating their talents.

This year, the spotlight was instead on the history of the Holocaust, a subject which has created a decidedly more sober atmosphere some students say. The first week of the camp included discussions of the Holocaust and a visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where students learned about the Terezin, the camp in which the opera was first performed.

One of the students Anne Norland, a recently graduated fifth-grader from Haycock Elementary School in Falls Church, and a second year veteran of the camp, said she has noticed the changes. “The style is much different than last year,” she said. “It’s definitely more emotional.”

But the intense discussion about the tragic history is contrasted by the tone of the opera, which at first glance is decidedly upbeat, capturing the feel of a traditional fairy tale.

In the story of “Brundibar,” two children living with their sick mother go on a search to for food and milk in order to help her get better. As they try to figure out a way to earn money for food, they come across the organ grinder named Brundibar. They watch as he plays his music and then as people drop money into his waiting hat.

Attempting to earn money through their own music, the children try their hand at singing, only to be drowned out by Brundibar, who then chases them away. As night comes their fear grows that they will never be able to make any money, but just as they start to despair, animals of the town, a cat, a dog, and a bird come to their aid, claiming their own grievances against the organ grinder.

The next day the children again go to work singing, but this time, as Brundibar tries to stop them, the dog and cat keep the organ grinder at bay while the bird summons other school children, who join in the song. With the assistance of the other children they attract the attention of the adults, who begin to put money in their cup.

In a final desperate attempt, Brundibar takes the cup and tries to escape with the money, but the animals and children follow, retrieving the money and declaring victory.

The music and libretto for Brundibar was written in 1938 by Hans Krasa and Adolf Hoffmeister as they lived in a Jewish ghetto in Prague. The piece was first performed by the residents of an orphanage there before the ghetto was liquidated and the Jewish population moved to concentration camps throughout Europe.

The music for Brundibar was then smuggled into Terezin or Theresienstadt as it was known in German, a ghetto in the fortress town just north of Prague. In the camp the piece was embraced by a community of artists and musicians interred there. Over the next five years the opera would be performed 55 times by children in the camp.

In contrast to places like Auschwitz or Treblinka, Terezin didn’t function as a death camp, instead it served as a way station for prisoners as they were moved from Germany east into Poland, where most eventually died or were executed.

And though it was safer than some of the camps, Terezin was hardly an easy place to live. While there wasn’t any organized killing, thousands died from starvation and disease. According to information from the U.S. Holocaust Museum, out of the 140,000 people detained at Terezin, 33,000 died at the camp and another 90,000 more were deported to camps further east.

Along with being a stopping point, the other function of Terezin was to serve as a false front to the rest of the world, giving a relatively positive image of concentration camps to international visitors and diverting attention from other camps in Europe. During a visit from the Red Cross in June of 1944, the Germans spruced up the camp, billing it as a “spa town” rather than a prison camp. Musical performances, which had previously been held in secret, were promoted by the Germans as part of the cultural atmosphere.

It was during this time that Brundibar was performed publicly to give the perception of a pleasant cultural life. It was later documented in the film “Der Fuehrer Schenkt den Juden eine Stadt” (“The Fuehrer Gives the Jews a City”) a piece of propaganda meant to give a good face to the concentration camps.

Weissberger, who was 12 at the time, can still remember with clarity those performances, as she played the role of the cat in all 55 shows. She said that even before their performances were officially sanctioned, they had been performing the opera in secret, finding in the music a little comfort from the difficulties around them.

“When we were on stage we forgot where we were,” she said. “The music took us away from all the trouble.”

The power that music has to provide both an escape and inspiration is something that set designer Kevin Adams tried to capture in the Washington Opera’s production of “Brundibar.” The set brings together opposing elements of a fantastical imaginary world in which the children try to find food for their mother, balancing that with a backdrop representing the real tragedy that surrounded those original performances.

Building up the magical feeling of the town, Adams shaped the buildings as representations of what they sell. The bread store, rather than simply having bread for sale, is actually shaped like a bread basket overflowing with loaves. The ice cream parlor is a cone topped with a swirl of ice cream on top, and inside the enormous cones are dotted with rhinestones to reflect the light. The overall feel is reminiscent of a children’s book by Dr. Seuss.

“I wanted to make the fantasy part of the story as unbelievable as the tragedy,” Adams told the News-Press.

To contrast the overdone fantasy, the backdrop, which continually frames the performance, is a painting of the wall that surrounded Terezin, the solid brick and barbed wire a reminder of the oppression the first children performers faced as they walked the stage.

But even as he highlights the obstacles of oppression he also emphasizes the way in which music and art can help people move beyond the walls that confine them. Along with lighting designer Jeff Berkerhoff, Adams has made it so that at times the seemingly solid wall becomes translucent, showing through the ghost of the wall, the villages and homes from which the inhabitants of Terezin were forced.

There’s something both hopeful and tragic about that image. While the sight of the homes appears as a sign of transcending their imprisonment, it is also a reminder about a normal world, destroyed through the ravages of the Holocaust.

David Simmons, the musical director and conductor said that the use of children’s voices adds to the potency of the performance. Unlike adult singers, whose trained voices have a muscular strength, children have a pure sound that emphasizes the vulnerability of the victims of the Holocaust.

Combined with the marshal quality in many of the songs, which use march time to give the sense of fighting towards a victory, there is a dialectic of strength and softness that is effective at communicating the message of the overall piece. “It’s just an incredible feeling of hope,” Simmons said, as he described the sound of the children singing. The hope is still there he insisted, even knowing that most of them never survived. “You know where these children are going.”

While that message is directed towards the audience, there is also an attempt by Simmons and staging director Cindy Oxberry to communicate to the young actors the deeper meaning of their performance, something Oxberry sees as both necessary and also very difficult. “I’m not sure they can go there,” she said.

To help them get some insight into the kind of tragedy seen in the Holocaust Oxberry uses equivalences in their own lives. Sometimes those things are simple, like the feelings of a pet dying or a friend moving away, other times she has talked about the feelings after the September 11 terrorist attacks, which due to the proximity for many of the students to the Pentagon, remains a powerful reference point. “That’s how you get to them,” she said, adding that for many of the students, the impact of what they learn during these several weeks at the camp might not be fully realized until much later in life.

Norland said that the discussions with Oxberry and Simmons along with the visit to the Holocaust Museum has helped her gain some insight into the tragedy, though she knows it is still mostly beyond her grasp. “Obviously you can’t exactly imagine it…but I can sort of get it,” Norland said.

When Norland and the rest of the singers do take the stage at the Roundhouse Theater this weekend, Weissberger might be the only person present who can really know what the terror of the Holocaust was like. During the war, she saw her friends disappear from around her, shipped off to other camps. In the end, though, she remained, ending up as one of 132 survivors out of 15,000 child residents of Terezin. “After our last performance, when other children were sent to the gas chamber, I thought that this little opera died with them,” she said. “But when it’s performed all over the world, I know that it’s lasted.”

Before the final curtain falls on the Washington production, a single child walks on stage with a candle burning, the sky blazing red behind and the music swelling. The tragedy is framed in a unique light, the voices of children and the power of a simple story providing a different perspective on one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century.