(The following article appeared in the April 25 issue of The Catholic Observer, newspaper of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield and is reprinted here with permission.)

Holocaust history is preserved in children’s opera, ‘Brundibar’

By Sister Catherine Homrok, SSJ

CHICOPEE — “I loved the role of the cat and I wouldn’t let anyone else play it,” said Ela Stein Weissberger. The Holocaust survivor was speaking to an audience of 500 middle school, high school, and college students, and adults who assembled at Elms College, here, on a Monday morning in late March.

They came for a special performance of the children’s opera, “Brundibar,” performed by Commonwealth Opera of western Massachusetts in partnership with the Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center of Springfield. As the sole living member of the original cast, Weissberger often leaves her New Jersey home to travel nationally and internationally to tell her personal story of the opera’s unique history.

“I feel that it’s really my duty to remind people of what happened and I just think that the stories are in me and it gives me an opportunity to get them out of me,” she said.
She also spoke at the college the previous evening after the opera and a performance of selections from I Never Saw Another Butterfly, a book of poems of the children of Terezin set to music.

Weissberger talked about how “Brundibar” was written in 1938 by Czech composer Hans Krasa and librettist Adolf Hoffmeister as the political upheaval in Eastern Europe was developing. That same year her father was arrested by the Gestapo and never reappeared. She was 8 years old when her family left the Sudetenland on the Czech-German border for safety in Prague.

“My father disappeared after the Kristallnacht and we never found out where. We were almost sure that he was killed in the town by the Nazis,” Weissberger said. She told her listeners, “When we came to Prague, we had to register as Jews and didn’t know why.”
She showed her audience the yellow identifying star that Jews were forced to wear and the book she coauthored, The Cat with the Yellow Star: Coming of Age in Terezin.
She explained that Terezin (Teresienstadt in German) was a walled town meant for 7,000 residents but that 141,000 people were held there in the span of four years. It was 60 miles from Prague and became a transit point for Czech Jews to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.

Weissberger said that when in 1942, at age 11, she arrived at Terezin with her mother, sister and grandmother, they were greeted with the sight of nine men hanging in the public square. With that warning, they were then relegated to work for the agriculture department and assigned barracks with very little space.
Around that time, Krasa, the composer of “Brundibar,” also was transported to Terezin. In 1942 he had worked with the children at the Jewish orphanage in Prague on a production of the opera. By July of 1943, nearly all the children of the original chorus and the orphanage staff had been transported to Terezin. 

Krasa was able to reconstruct the opera using musical instruments available at the camp and that September his little opera was introduced in Terezin where it was performed 55 times in the course of a year.

Weissberger said that she was grateful that music helped her to forget and to have played the role of the cat for all 55 performances.

“You are forgetting that you are hungry and everything when you listen to good music. The music was a big part in our lives. We were singing all the time and so with ‘Brundibar’ it was easy for us to go and perform,” she said.

The opera which runs about 45 minutes was intended for a cast of children. Basically a folk tale, it is about two fatherless children who try to earn money through their singing to buy milk for their sick mother.

Though its plot is a simple story of good, depicted by the two children triumphing over the evil represented by the organ grinder, Brundibar, a reminder of Hitler, the opera was filmed by the Nazis as part of a propaganda documentary to prove that Jews were well-treated.

For the same purpose, a special production of “Brundibar” was staged in 1944 for visiting members of the Red Cross who came to Terezin to inspect the camp. What the visitors did not realize at the time was that thousands of the detained had been sent to Auschwitz before their arrival to mask the camp’s overcrowded conditions. On Oct. 16, 1944, Hans Krasa was set to Auschwitz where he was among those exterminated.

Prior to the Commonwealth Opera’s Monday performance at the Elms, which featured its adult and youth members, its artistic director, Ron Luchsinger, greeted the audience. “Today this innocent little opera is now playing all over the world and is a reminder of the tyranny that we have to be mindful and watchful of at all times,” he said.

After experiencing the opera and hearing Weissberger speak, Justina Thengumthyil, an Elms College sophomore spoke with The Catholic Observer. “You get caught up with what’s here in the present and I think a lot of people should take the opportunity and listen to someone who actually experienced this type of horrific tragedy and hear their story,” she said.

Monica Czausz, a “Brundibar” cast member and an eighth grade student at Holy Name School, Chicopee, said that she not only had the pleasure of playing the cat in that performance but she was delighted to meet the role’s originator. “It was a real honor. It was unbelievable to be a part of bringing back history. I was very humbled by it,” she told the Observer.

For Rabbi Robert Sternberg, the executive director of Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center, the productions at Elms College held special significance. “It’s a really once in a lifetime opportunity to meet an extraordinary individual like Ela Weissberger, who is the sole survivor of this particular experience. The lesson of ‘Brundibar’ is timeless and it catalyzes interest among all the schools.

“It does it in a way that is wholly consistent with our mission and the kind of education that we’re trying to put out into the community because we don’t teach about the Holocaust in order to depress people. We teach about the Holocaust to empower people,” he said.