Carolina Choir, Symphony Orchestra to perform tribute to victims of concentration camp

The Carolina Choir and UNC Symphony Orchestra will perform the Defiant Requiem, a tribute to the prisoners of the Terezín concentration camp in the current Czech Republic, today in Memorial Hall.

The creator of The Defiant Requiem Foundation, Murry Sidlin, will be conducting the performance. He said, for him, it’s about understanding.

“Terezín was a concentration camp from ’41 to ’45. All together 150,000 prisoners went through there and very few survived,” he said. “It was a way station for Auschwitz.”

Sidlin said Terezín stood out from the other camps because of its large population of artists and musicians. The prisoners would gather and perform music in order to keep up their morale.

“They were able to put on over 1,000 concerts, and one of the most famous ones was the performance of Verdi’s ‘Requiem,’” he said. “One of the big questions was why would a Jewish crowd in a concentration camp bother to learn a Catholic requiem and perform it over and over again.”

The answer was simple, Sidlin said. Verdi’s “Requiem” is a piece about the judgment of God, and the prisoners sang it to the Nazis.

“They were singing about a day of wrath coming to the Nazis,” Sidlin said. “In other words, ‘You’ll get yours.’”

The conductor who put together the Verdi requiem at Terezín, Raphael Schächter, used the performance to try to show the outside world what was happening at the concentration camp.

“He was the genius that put together the Verdi requiem, and the climax of these performances was when they sang before the International Red Cross and the Nazis, in the hopes that the Red Cross would see the camp for what it really was,” Sidlin said.

Junior Jeremiah Hartsock, a singer in the requiem, said this performance is a tribute. He said he’s moved by the message behind the Defiant Requiem and gets chills when he hears the piece.

“Verdi’s ‘Requiem’ is very powerful,” Hartsock said. “It’s incredibly powerful and it’s defiant because the piece they sing is about the judgement of God. So they sing this to the Nazis as they come to film their propaganda.”

He said Terezín was one of the locations the Nazis used to film propaganda for their campaign in Germany, and that the prisoners performed the requiem wherever they could.

“There were records of people being deported to Auschwitz and other death camps and still singing on the platforms as they were put in boxcars,” he said.

Music professor Michael Figueroa said this performance is the last event in a series that’s been going on all semester, including academic conferences and film screenings.

“My role was planning an academic conference that sort of put this idea of commemorating trauma into a global perspective,” he said.

Figueroa said the Defiant Requiem spawned academic discussion about music’s role in commemorating tragedy, as well as cooperation between different branches of the University to help put it on.

“It created a great opportunity for interdisciplinary cooperation at UNC,” he said. “This has involved all different sorts of groups across campus and has really enabled us to come together around questions that concern more than just one small group.”

university@dailytarheel.com