Posts with the concentration camp 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.

(more…)

Barris Beat

Acts of liberation

Written by Ted Barris on . 2 Comments
Veteran glider pilot Martin Maxwell and dispatch rider Harry Watts pause at the British Airborne Museum at Oosterbeek, Holland (2015).
Veteran glider pilot Martin Maxwell and dispatch rider Harry Watts pause at the British Airborne Museum at Oosterbeek, Holland (2015).

Early in May, 70 years ago, a Second World War glider pilot named Martin Maxwell tasted freedom for the first time in nearly eight months. On Sept. 17, 1944, during his second airborne operation, he had delivered British soldiers and equipment in a controlled crash landing near Arnhem, Holland, during the Operation Market Garden, only to be wounded and captured days later. But on May 1, 1945, with the Germans surrendering all over Europe, Maxwell regained his freedom.

“A British tank came into our POW camp,” he said, “and we were liberated.” (more…)