Theresienstadt Ghetto

They banned Schoenberg and Weill and targeted Jewish composers.

Ross tells the heartbreaking story of Viktor Ullmann, who kept composing in the Theresienstadt camp before being sent to Auschwitz.

The Nazis weren't Philistines.

They were music lovers with a twisted, politicized idea of what music should be.

The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

After 1941, Jews were rounded up, first into local collection points, later on to trains bound for the nearby fortress of Theresienstadt, and from there to extermination camps further east.

In Auschwitz, Krebs behaved as if he was a king and supervised the arrests of Czech patriots, trade union men, and also priests.

He championed the twin policy of carrot and stick, higher bread rations for obedient citizens, strict quotas, forced labor and violence for those who remained loyal to the Czechoslovak Republic, and in opposition to the occupiers.

And I wanna leave you all with one woman's story.

Ilse Weber was a poet, a singer, who was imprisoned in the ghetto of Theresienstadt during the Second World War with her family.

As she was there, she didn't write symphonies, but she wrote songs to entertain the elderly and the children.

That's the power of music, and that was the gift of one woman.

Her destination was not Liverpool Street.

It was Theresienstadt.

Between the time Airbnb went public in late 2020 and the day a mob was sent to storm the Capitol building in early January 2021, a friend sent us a board game called Airbnbopoly, a riff on the old favorite Monopoly.

The familiar railway stations had been replaced with some of the world's busiest airports, neighborhoods and streets had been substituted with countries, and the priciest city locations with castles and igloos.

Viktor E. Frankl's Manners Search for Meaning, published in 1946.

Frankl was a brilliant Austrian psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, and Dachau, though his pregnant wife, his parents, and his brother were all murdered by the Nazis.

This book is structurally unique.

It is essentially two entirely different books bound together by a single thesis.

One of them is Dita Polakhova.

After spending years under the Nazi occupation and one year in the Theresienstadt ghetto, Dieter and her parents were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in December 1943.

Between the 26th of October 1942 and the 28th of October 1944, the Germans deported nearly 47,000 Jews from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz in 27 transports.

While at Riesenstadt life was worth something, at Auschwitz this was no longer the case.

When Dieter's transport arrived in Auschwitz, it was at nighttime.

From that moment, Dieter was not called by her name anymore.

She became only a number.

73305 They were placed into B2B family camp, called Theresienstadt Family Camp Auschwitz, established on the 8th of September 1943 for the Jews from the ghetto in Theresien.

Uncle Ludwig's widow, Aunt Manja, who was not a Jew, did not obey the law forbidding non-Jews to have contact with Jews, and kept helping Dieter and her parents, bringing food and other necessities.

In November 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi architect of the Holocaust, established the Theresienstadt Ghetto, which was located in the fortress town of Theresien, in the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

The first transport of Czech Jews arrived in the same month.

At that time, Dieter's father was employed as a clerk in one of the departments of the Jewish Community Center.

Another department had the task, ordered by the Nazis, to make up lists of people to be deported.

Thanks to Dieter's father's job, their own deportation was delayed for a few months.

However, Dieter's grandparents were deported to Theresienstadt in July 1942.

Dieter, along with her parents, followed them in November the same year.

And, and what makes it worse is that you, you just don't know what's happening.

In, in Auschwitz, in Madonhak, in Matthausen, in, in Theresienstadt, in all the, uh, camps in, in Russia, in Poland, the Yidden didn't know what was going on.

For most of the war, Klal Yisrael had no idea what the Germans were up to, what their plan was.

And we look at even recent history.