Song of Life From a Place of Death : Music: The Boston Symphony Orchestra will perform a string work--lost for nearly four decades--written at a ‘model’ Nazi concentration camp by Pavel Haas.

Almost 50 years ago in the Nazi “model” concentration camp Terezin in Czechoslovakia, artists and composers were permitted to paint, draw, write and lecture. One of the works created there, Pavel Haas’ “Study for String Orchestra,” survived, even though its composer did not.

Although Haas probably knew he and almost everyone else at the camp were doomed, he wrote a piece that is celebrated today for being full of life. The 12-minute work--which was lost for nearly four decades--will be performed tonight when Seiji Ozawa conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

“It’s like discovering a new art piece,” said Ozawa, who conducted the single-movement work for four string sections last January in New York. “He wrote this hopeful piece, so gay.”

Terezin, called Theresienstadt in German, was unique because the camp and its prisoners, many of them important European artists, were used to dupe visiting commissions of the International Red Cross and persuade the world that the Nazi treatment of Jews was humane.

The truth is that more than 140,000 Jews, the majority from Central and Western Europe, were sent to Terezin--88,000 eventually were shipped off to death camps such as Auschwitz--and 33,000 died there of illness, disease, torture or execution.

Haas was one of several composers at Terezin, which was in operation from 1941 until it was liberated by the Soviet army in 1945. After the war, most of the music and other art was presumed lost or destroyed, had fallen into private hands or languished in archives, silenced by the Communist regime’s anti-Semitic politics.

But thanks to BSO violist Mark Ludwig, who founded the Terezin Chamber Music Foundation to preserve, perform and record the music composed there, the works of Haas and others have not perished.

Ludwig, 34, whose Jewish studies and interest in the Holocaust lead him to begin researching Terezin four years ago, said Haas had written “Study for String Orchestra” for Karel Ancerl, who formed a string orchestra in Terezin.

Ludwig said Ancerl was “one of the very few musicians to survive.” After the war ended, Ancerl returned to Terezin to locate the Haas piece but found parts of the manuscript missing. Ancerl was able to reconstruct the score but never performed it “due to its strong emotional associations,” Ludwig said. The work lay forgotten for years.

In 1988, Ludwig found a yellowed copy of the Haas work while researching the state archives in Czechoslovakia. Last year, he brought the piece to the attention of Ozawa, who was looking for a string piece to include in the BSO’s program.

“It has lots of energy, strong energy in the first and last sections, and I mostly like the second, which is very slow,” said Ozawa, adding that it was the work’s rhythm, quality and spirit that initially impressed him.

At the time, Ozawa knew nothing about the work’s history (Ozawa had worked with Ancerl and succeeded him as director of the Toronto Symphony in 1965).

“I do not select music because of personal reasons--only artistic,” Ozawa said. Only after he decided to conduct the piece did Ludwig explain its tragic history.

“It’s amazing that this kind of piece--it’s not easy to play--could come from a place like that,” said Ozawa. “I’m sure (Haas) knew he was going to be killed. . . . (The composition) was like somebody who is not happy, yet was looking forward to paradise, another world, the next life.”

For many inmates at Terezin, art became a form of spiritual resistance, allowing them to maintain a sense of human dignity amid inhumane living conditions.

“The music of Terezin kept the people on a human level because it allowed them to think about something more than survival,” said Joza Karas, author of “Music in Terezin” and violin instructor at the Hartt School of Music of the University of Hartford in Connecticut. Karas has spent the last 20 years researching and performing the music of Terezin, amassing more than 50 works composed there.

“Theresienstadt was one of a kind,” concurred Aaron Breitbart, senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in West Los Angeles. “It was not a mass murder camp. It was a way station where prisoners were sent east (to Auschwitz). But it was a strange place, sheerly Kafka-esque. You would think that people would know a little bit more about it.

“The idea was to throw everybody off,” explained Breitbart. “It was a place of death, yet played off as a place of culture. It would be like the Iraqis gathering a few thousand Kurds right now and show them feasting, saying this is representative of all the other Kurds. Most people find that incomprehensible, but the Nazis did a lot of this. It was one of the crowning examples of the use of propaganda in its most cynical form.”

The Nazis referred to Terezin as the Paradise City. They promoted it to the Jews as a leisure retirement community for the elderly and a promised city of refuge until halted immigration could be resumed after the war. Before the International Red Cross visit of June 23, 1944, the Nazis spruced up the “model camp” and sent 7,500 prisoners to Auschwitz to eliminate overcrowding at Terezin.

Before the Red Cross visit, graphic artists imprisoned at Terezin were assigned by the Nazis to produce artwork reflecting an idyllic community of open-air parks, concert halls, cafes with waiters, a bank and spacious living quarters. Many of the artists smuggled out artwork documenting the reality of the camp; later, they paid with their lives.

When the Red Cross committee returned to Stockholm, it issued a favorable report on the facility. Buoyed by the positive response, the Nazis produced a propaganda film on Terezin, “The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews,” which included a staged concert featuring Ancerl bowing to an audience. A month after the concert, most of those who were seen in the film were sent to Auschwitz. Haas and several others were killed the day they arrived.

“The music of Terezin represents the spirit against the brutal force of the Nazis,” said Karas. “Although they died there, they’re still speaking through their music.”

TEREZIN SCORES

* Four scores composed in Terezin will be published this month by Visionary Music Publishing in New York for distribution by Warner Bros., Joza Karas said. Also this month, theTerezin Music Chamber Foundation plans a first release of a series of chamber recordings. In addition, Mark Ludwig and three other Boston Symphony Orchestra musicians who regularly perform the music of Terezin have been invited to perform next spring at the opening of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Beit Hashosh-Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles.