Terezin camp spirit to live on in Leeds music project - The Jewish Chronicle

A Holocaust actress who performed eight plays inside a Nazi concentration camp will launch an international Holocaust music research hub by telling how the power of creative arts gave freedom amid hell.

Terezin camp survivor Zdenka Fantlová, 89, was friends with the Jewish elite of Czech musicians, actors and writers interned at the Terezin concentration camp near Prague. The Nazis, notoriously, allowed Jewish artists to perform there, partially as a propaganda stunt to deceive the world about its war crimes.

Ms Fantlova, who acted in the camp's Jewish theatre, was once serenaded in a barracks by pianist Gideon Klein. The composer wrote major classical works to bring hope to camp inmates amid appalling conditions where 150,000 Jews were interned. He was later murdered, aged 26, never to take up his scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

"I sat in the darkness while he played Chopin. I was thinking this is almost surreal, this brilliant pianist, a genius, playing in the night only for me. He should be in the Carnegie Hall playing for large audiences," Ms Fantlová recounted.