To Remember and Bear Witness

The music of composers who died in Nazi death camps wonderfully survives. But the way Gideon Klein’s Duo for Violin and Violoncello breaks off abruptly in the second movement is an eerie reminder of the horrific reality of that time.

Klein died in 1945 in Furstengrube, a Nazi concentration camp in Silesia, one of millions--including thousands of children--exterminated deliberately and coldly.

Klein and others who perished, as well as those who survived, will be honored at “An Evening of Holocaust Remembrance: The Children of Terezin” at 7 p.m. Monday in Memorial Hall at Chapman University in Orange. Admission and parking (in the structure at Sycamore and Lemon streets) are free of charge.

Klein’s Duo will be played by Pacific Symphony concertmaster Raymond Kobler and principal cellist Timothy Landauer. Kobler also will play “Nigun” from Ernest Bloch’s “Baal Shem: Three Pictures of Chassidic Life.”

Members of Opera Pacific will perform selections from Hans Krasa’s children’s opera “Brundibar,” originally staged in 1943 as a propaganda tool at Terezin, a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. (Krasa died in Auschwitz, as did composers Pavel Haas and Viktor Ullmann.)

Ela Stein Weissberger, who played the Cat 55 times in the original production and one of about 100 survivors of the 15,000 children interned at Terezin, will speak. Poems written by children in the camp (Theresienstadt in German) will be read.

Chapman president James L. Doti will speak, as will Rabbi Shelton Donnell of Temple Beth Sholom in Santa Ana and Ronald Farmer, dean of All Faiths Chapel at Chapman.

The event is presented by the university’s internationally recognized Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education in conjunction with Yom Hashoah, a day of Holocaust Remembrance observed around the world. The holiday this year is Thursday. The Chapman program is made possible through a grant from the Kenneth and Laura Honig Foundation.

Marilyn Harran, Stern Chair in Holocaust Education and founding director of the Rodgers Center, has put the event together and will introduce it.

“We thought that at Chapman we could play a very special role and be a gathering point for people from all religious traditions who want to come together and want to remember and learn and become witnesses to the future,” Harran said.

“Chapman is not a Jewish institution. I am not Jewish. I regard this as something for humanity. That’s really what we’re trying to do.”

*

Hired as an associate professor of religion at Chapman in 1985, Harran first began teaching about the Holocaust as part of the university’s freshman seminar program in 1987.

“When I began teaching, at Barnard College in the ‘70s, not very many resources were available. Survivors were far more reticent to talk about their experiences then than they are now. The survivors now are so courageous to relive that horrible period of their lives in order to try to shape young people, to teach them that you can’t tolerate small acts of injustice because tolerating small acts prepares for the big acts.

“Who knew what when--while an important question--is not the most interesting and the most overwhelming one. To me, the question is, when non-Jewish German citizens read about the Nuremberg Laws, why didn’t they do something? This was arguably the most cultured, sophisticated country in Europe, and here were people who for various reasons chose to be uninvolved, chose to be bystanders.

“The most important lesson is: None of us can afford to be bystanders. You can’t bring that about by preaching, but by presenting models who have chosen not to be bystanders.”

Advisor for the music part of the program is Pacific Symphony president John Forsyte.

“My parents are Holocaust survivors, so I have a very strong personal interest in the subject,” Forsyte said.

“Just last summer, my parents went back to Europe for the first time. My father had not been back to Poland in 55 years. It was a very emotional experience and created a lot of closure. It brought me closer to the subject matter.”

Impressed by Harran’s work at Chapman, Forsyte discussed ways in which the symphony could also become involved. Through the Terezin Chamber Music Foundation in Boston, he had discovered music written by composers who died in the concentration camps and proposed that several chamber works be part of the remembrance program.

“We thought that the Gideon Klein Duo was a particularly poignant work,” he said.

“When I approached Raymond Kobler, he was more than happy to learn it, as was Timothy Landauer. Raymond also suggested adding the second movement of the ‘Baal Shem’ suite, [portraying] a culture that has almost vanished from Europe, particularly eastern Europe.”

“Anything involving the Holocaust, I am more than willing to do,” Kobler said. “My father fled in 1938 from Austria, from Vienna. Four of his aunts perished at Auschwitz and also, on his side, my grandfather. So it is something that is a living thing within me.”

*

Klein’s Duo was discovered in 1990. “Until then, it was considered lost,” Kobler said. “It ends in the middle of a phrase, as if he had to go somewhere.

“I also felt that, ‘My God, we have to do “Nigun.” ’ It is the Old Testament. It’s Solomon. It’s one of the most powerful pieces. The whole ‘Baal Shem’ suite of Bloch is fantastic. This event is the setting for ‘Nigun,’ if there ever was one.”

The Klein Duo, which has been compared to works by Webern and Hindemith, presents the musicians with some problems of interpretation, however, according to Kobler and Landauer.

*

The composer indicated chromatic changes--sharps and flats--on every note he apparently wanted altered, even repeated notes within a single measure. The standard practice is to make a change only once and to assume that any repeated note is automatically played the same way.

“We have yet to try to figure all that out,” Landauer said. “It’s a little bit frustrating to read. We are so used to the cancellation [of a sharp or flat] or another reminder [after the bar line].”

Still, Landauer believes the work has a life ahead.

“It will be played more in the future,” he said.

As for participating in the Remembrance Day program, Landauer feels that he’s playing “a very humble role in this very noble cause.”

“I was born in a different era and in a different part of the world, in Asia,” he said. “But we had our own atrocities in the war, when the Japanese invaded China.

“That we humans as a whole could have let the Holocaust happen is really mind-boggling.”

Chris Pasles can be reached at (714) 966-5602 or by e-mail at chris.pasles@latimes.com.

SHOW TIMES

“An Evening of Holocaust Remembrance: The Children of Terezin,” Memorial Hall at Chapman University, 1 University Drive, Orange. Monday, 7 p.m. Doors open 6:30 p.m. Free. (Parking in the structure at Sycamore and Lemon is also free.) (714) 628-7377.