Posts with the Terezin tag

Barris Beat

From isolation can come greatness

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment
Composer Viktor Ullmann, imprisoned but not silenced.

Imagine a curfew keeping you inside your home. You can. Imagine quarantine as if it were imprisonment. You can. Then, imagine coming up with a unique way to deal with your isolation by turning to one of your life skills. I imagine that you can do that too.

That’s what Victor Ullmann did, in 1942. Imprisoned at a place called Terezin, a concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Bohemia, Ullmann, a music composer by profession, wrote an opera inside the prison depicting his predicament. It was called The Emperor of Atlantis.

“It’s a (musical) parable about a mad, murderous ruler,” wrote a reviewer years later, “who proclaims universal war.” (more…)

Barris Beat

History that speaks volumes

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment
Veronika Shavikova

Several years into the Second World War, a young teacher in a small Czechoslovak town made a decision. It nearly cost him his life. Oldrich Patrovsky, who taught primary grades so he could support his family, in 1942, watched Jewish neighbours uprooted and transported away. He chose to help some of them escape the Nazi dragnet. He was arrested and incarcerated inside the 18th century military fortress at Terezin. It’s a place in the former Czechoslovakia that the Nazis had transformed into a prison for political prisoners and a transit camp to redirect Jewish prisoners to death camps in Eastern Europe.

“His crime was being ‘a friend of Jews,’” Patrovsky’s great-granddaughter told me this week.

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Barris Beat

Resist to live

Written by Ted Barris on . 1 Comment
Jan Palach memorial at Wenceslas Square in Prague.
Jan Palach memorial at Wenceslas Square in Prague.

On Jan. 19, 1969, a university student, named Jan Palach, died in a hospital in Prague. Three days earlier he had gone to Wenceslas Square, near a statue of the 10th century duke of Bohemia (and the “Good King Wenceslas” of Christmas carol fame). There, in front of his history classmates and the authorities, he set himself on fire in protest against the Soviet Union’s occupation of his homeland. His suicide was a final act of defiance against the latest in a long line of occupiers of his country – the Czech Republic.

“It was [his] last appeal for resistance,” author Petr Cornej wrote.

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