Film music composer Jocelyn Pook was commissioned by the Jewish Music Institute to create a dramatized song cycle based on poems and drawings by children in the Terezin concentration camp in what used to be Czechoslovakia. Just 150 of 15,000 children deported to the transit camp and from there to Auschwitz survived.
In the first video below, Pook talks about the commission and her response to it, and how, subsequently, the work she titled Drawing Life became a larger multimedia production about the Holocaust. (Read more about Pook's commission in her article "Drawing Life: Inside a Concentration Camp, the Joy of Being Alive", The Guardian, February 2, 2016.) Also featured in the video is the multidiscipinary dramaturg and director Emma Bernard, who recounts her use of archival footage and images and text from diaries and personal accounts.
A tour of Drawing Life took place in January of this year in the United Kingdom.
Below is the video that serves as the trailer for Drawing Life:
"Stories from Terezin: the Nazi Transit Camp with a Musical Legacy - Interactive" (The Guardian, April 5, 2013)
Poetry of the Holocaust (pdf)
"The Butterfly" by Pavel Friedmann (1921-1944), Jewish Czechoslovak Poet
Pavel Friedmann, I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from the Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944 (Schocken; 2nd Ed., 1994)
Terezin Memorial
Jocelyn Pook on FaceBook
Writing Without Paper, "The Saving Grace of Music", November 11, 2010
Jocelyn Pook on FaceBook
Writing Without Paper, "The Saving Grace of Music", November 11, 2010
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