The “Defiant Requiem”
Note: For Verdi’s Requiem, TFO is partnering with
the Florida Holocaust Museum to tell the haunting
story of how Jews in the Terezin/Theresienstadt
concentration camp learned the Requiem from a
single score and sang it as a message to their captors.
Here is what happened, provided by the museum.
Located 30 miles north of Prague, Terezin/
Theresienstadt was turned into a Jewish ghetto
and concentration camp by the Nazis after
their occupation of Czechoslovakia. The camp
was unusual in that inmates included highly
educated Jewish scholars and scientists as well as
internationally renowned artists, musicians and
actors including Czech composer Rafael Schächter
and the famous German rabbi Leo Baeck. After
grueling hours of forced labor, the malnourished
prisoners would crowd together to hold discussions
on philosophy and religion, to draw, to write poetry
and to sing and play music. Baeck recounted that
“all those hours were hours in which a community
arose out of the mass and the narrowness grew
wide. They were hours of freedom.”
In 1943, Schächter recruited 150 singers who met
for months in a dimly lit basement to learn the
Verdi Requiem. Using a single vocal score, he taught
the complex music through rote and repetition,
accompanied only by piano. Schächter conducted
16 performances of the Requiem for audiences of
other prisoners. Replacements for choir members
were needed at least three times, as prisoners
were continually sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau
extermination camp.
After the deportation of Danish Jews to Terezin, King
Christian X of Denmark demanded information on
how the Danish deportees were treated. Seeing the
opportunity to spread disinformation and augment
their propaganda efforts on a worldwide stage, the
Nazis decided to allow a visit by the International
Red Cross and the Danish Red Cross. Over 7,000
people were deported immediately to Auschwitz-
Birkenau to combat the overcrowded conditions,
public areas were cleaned up, gardens planted,
and fake shops and cafés were created to give the
impression that the Jews had a good life in Terezin.
The Red Cross inspection was held on June 23,
1944. Compelled by the Nazis to give what would be
their final performance, the singers hoped that the
inspectors would hear the theme of the Requiem
and understand their plight. Instead, the inspectors
were completely taken in by the Nazi efforts.
Holocaust architect Adolph Eichmann was later
quoted as having said, “Those crazy Jews — singing
their own requiem.” Schächter was deported to
THE FLORIDA OR 40 CHESTRA | 2017-2018
Auschwitz-Birkenau on October 16, 1944. He did not
survive the Holocaust.
The actions of the prisoners of Terezin to hold
onto their humanity through the arts and sciences
were in direct defiance to the Nazi plan to degrade,
deprive and dehumanize them. The performances
of the Verdi Requiem in Terezin later became
known symbolically as “The Defiant Requiem.”
Terezin survivor Edgar Krasa explains, “We sang
to the Nazis what we could not say to them.
These performances allowed the performers
and the audiences to immerse themselves into
the world of art and happiness, forget the reality
of Ghetto life and deportations, and gather
strength to better cope with the loss of freedom.”