BY TAMMY McKILLIP
Correspondent
Above, the cast of the original production of “Brundibar” in Terezin. Ela Weissberger, as the Cat, is wearing all black in the front row. She will be in attendance for the upcoming shows in Holmdel. At left, photo of the original promotional poster for “Brundibar.” What do 28 children from Holmdel, Colts Neck, Matawan, Keansburg and Middletown have in common with Holocaust survivor Ela Weissberger? A love of music, and a 69-year-old opera.
“ ‘Brundibar’ was an opera put on by the children in a concentration camp called Terezin,” Dale Daniels, executive director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at Brookdale Community College, Lincroft, said of the Duncan Smith Theater’s latest production. “The theme of the people in the play is very much good triumphing over evil. It was really a form of resistance representing the art, the culture and the spirit of the people at that time.”
To the 140,000 Jews who passed through the Czechoslovakian town during the years just before the end of World War II, Terezin was a concentration camp – a temporary holding place where European and Scandinavian intellectuals, artists, musicians, writers and other detained Jews were either bartered for war goods across national boundaries or transported to death camps. Although the conditions were overcrowded, and disease and death were commonplace, Jews sent to Terezin, or Theresienstadt, as the Germans called it, were considered “privileged” in the sense that they were allowed to study, create and perform during their internment. Unlike most of the camp’s former residents, much of their art, music and poetry survived.
“The opera [by Hans Krasa] was very famous because it was part of an attempt by the Nazis to prove to the world they weren’t destroying the Jews,” Daniels said. “They brought in the Red Cross for an examination of what was supposed to be an ideal Jewish community, and they actually deported about 7,500 inhabitants of the camp right before, in order to clear it out and make it look not so crowded.”
According to the survivors of Terezin, the camp was made overnight into a “model” town, with cafes, theaters and school yards full of happy children. The Red Cross representatives were ushered throughout the town by their Nazi escorts and never questioned what they saw, which included a performance of “Brundibar.”
TAMMY MCKILLIP “Brundibar” director Paul Hart applies whiskers to a cast member during a rehearsal for the Holmdel Theater Company’s production of the historic children’s opera. “Of course, it was all a farce, and when that day was over, almost everyone who participated in that day was then deported to Auschwitz and killed,” said Daniels.
She said the opera tells the tale of a group of children, assisted by various animals, triumphing over an evil organ grinder, Brundibar. How they survived is an example of how art and music were used as tools of spiritual resistance by the imprisoned Jews.
“It’s very important to teach about this resistance that it didn’t just take place in the woods or by the partisans as physical fighting, but that the art and the culture and the music that survived from the time is just as important as a form of resistance. Clearly, that’s what ‘Brundibar’ was,” Daniels said.
Seymour Siegler, a retired professor of psychology at Brookdale and director of the Center for Holocaust Studies, said that survivor Ela Weissberger first contacted him 20 years ago, when Felix Molzer, the recently deceased director of the Monmouth Conservatory of Music, first brought the show to the center from Europe.
“I got a call when we did the production originally, and it was Ela. She said, ‘Are you the people putting on Brundibar?’ And I said, ‘Yes¿’ and she said, ‘Well, I played the role of the Cat in the Terezin production.’ I was absolutely floored. She said, ‘Can I come?’ And I said, ‘Of course!’ We invited her, and when the production was over, we announced that she was there in the audience watching it, and she was mobbed. Since that time, she travels around the country wherever the production is done, whenever she can make it, and she gets mobbed, particularly by the kids who are in the show. Sometimes, she even sings the final chorus of the show on the stage with the kids. She’s quite a woman.”
“ ‘Brundibar’ was our life, really,” said Weissberger, who has lived in Tappan, N.Y., for the past 42 years. “It meant a lot because opera was, at that time, only for adults. I mean, my parents used to go to the opera houses to listen to Wagner and so on, and all of a sudden, after a year in Terezin, the caretaker came to our barrack and said that they were trying out for these parts in a children’s opera!”
Weissberger said that she was chosen out of 28 girls in her barrack to play the part of the Cat. Because her mother was living in the same barrack where the opera was performed, she was able to see her daughter play the role many times before the camp was liberated by the Soviets in May 1945.
“It was my sister’s birthday, so we really celebrated,” she said. “Later on, it wasn’t really a happy celebration because we found out that almost nobody from our family survived.”
She said she travels now “anytime, anywhere” the show is being performed because she feels it is her “duty to keep the memory of those children that can’t be with us. It is my duty to speak about it because the children that were with me in it are not here, so I speak in their voices, and I hope that ‘Brundibar’ will live after me, that it will never die.”
Holmdel’s Varun Janbhampati, 11, plays the Ice Cream Man. He said it is a “very significant experience” for him to perform in front of Weissberger.
“We play the same people that the people who were held in the Nazi camp played,” Janbhampati said.
Siegler said the current cast is looking forward to having Weissberger at all six performances of the production, which opens on March 24. He said that the Center for Holocaust Studies keeps tabs on other Holocaust survivors in the local community to see how they are doing, and that there are currently two other survivors from Terezin who live in the area. They are also expected to attend the show.
According to director Paul Hart, there has already been discussion about bringing the show back to the theater again.
“There are only six performances,” he said. “We’ve been talking about the possibility of bringing it back, since the popularity
of the show has just overwhelmed us. We’ve had very little publicity, but the reality is that the student performances sold out before we even had a cast.”
He said the short opera is framed on either end with poetry and an accompanying choral piece based on the poems and artwork by some of the 15,000 children who passed through the camp, called “I Never Saw Another Butterfly.”
“Always when you do ‘Brundibar,’ you’re doing it in the memory and in tribute to the 15,000 children who passed through Terezin and later died at Auschwitz,” he said. “Our second tribute is to Felix Molzer, who found the show and did so much to bring this kind of quality production to Monmouth County.”
Hart said that Molzer’s widow, Jeannette Molzer, will also be in the audience at the production.
“Felix found this show 20 years ago, and when he and I did the first production here in the states, it was so successful that we took it to Edinburgh, Scotland, to the French Festival. He called in 2005 to say, ‘Let’s do it again,’ and I said, ‘OK.’ He died unexpectedly, and I have continued this production as a commitment to a person who did an incredible amount of music for adults and children in Monmouth County.”
Hart said that because of its unique history, “Brundibar” has something for everyone.
“The young kids only see it as a neat little show that has kids banding together and overthrowing a bad guy, and senior citizens see it as a generational production,” Hart said. “Good theater, good music, good literature takes you out of the everyday into some kind of spiritual – for want of a better word – experience, and this production does that. It is transcendent. Everybody takes something from it, and not many productions have that kind of depth.”
Weissberger agreed.
“Many years ago, when I was invited to Washington, D.C., for a performance of ‘Brundibar’ at the Kennedy Center, I said what an amazing thing it was that I’m in America, I’m free, and this little opera will be performed at the Kennedy Center,” she said. “When the last transport sent the kids to their death, I thought that this little opera died with them, but it didn’t happen. This opera is still alive, and they will also be alive if we will not forget them.”
The Duncan Smith Theater is located at 36 Crawfords Corners Road, on the Holmdel High School campus. “Brundibar” opens on March 24 and runs through March 30. Public performances are at 7 p.m. on Saturday and 2 p.m. on Sunday. Reservations for these performances can be made through the phone reservation system at the Duncan Smith Theater at (732) 946-0427. The four student performances, which take place March 29 and 30 at 10 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., are already sold out.
For more information on the Center for Holocaust Studies and its many educational and cultural programs, call (732) 224-2283.