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Lori Laitman: Vedem. Angela Niederloh, mezzo soprano; Ross Hauck, tenor; The Northwest Boychoir; Music of Remembrance; Mina Miller, piano. (Naxos 8.559685; 61:18)
I. The Transports: "Hear my story now," "Memories of Prague." II. Home Number One: "Home Number One," "Five." III. Vedem: "Vedem," "Just a Little Warmth," "In Terezin the Mind was Free," "Thoughts," "Like Leaves About To Fall," "Love in the Floodgates," "We Were Alive, Approximately." IV. A Model Ghetto. V. They Are Gone: "They Are Gone," "Farewell To Summer," "We Were No Different Than You." Fathers: "Don't Cry, Fragment 1," "You, Father," "Don't Cry, Fragment 2," "Last Night I Dreamt," "Don't Cry, Fragment 3," "I Saw My Father Drowning," "Don't Cry."
When we reflect on the horrors of the Holocaust, we must not fail to remember that millions of children were victims of this unspeakable nightmare. We sometimes forget that some of the most stirring stories of courage in the face of this horror involve children. One of the most inspiring occurred in the Terezin concentration camp. In an gesture of laudable selflessness, the camp's Jewish council of elders arranged for the children of the camp to be housed in their own facilities, in hopes that they would be spared at least some of the relentless horror experienced by the adults. The fourteen year old boys who lived in a room known as Home One were fortunate (or at least as fortunate as one could possibly be in such a place) to be led by a gifted and creative educator named Valtr Eisinger, who helped foster a strong sense of brotherhood there.
If anything made life bearable for those young men in Home One, it was a secret magazine they created together called Vedem [In the lead], a vehicle for their original prose, poetry, and artwork. Every Friday night, the boys would gather together to read aloud whatever they had created for the latest edition of their magazine. "Their writings," says Mina Miller, in her beautifully written liner notes, "reveal inspirational courage, passionate idealism, and wisdom far beyond the years of their young authors." One of the boys, Sidney Taussig, had the astonishing foresight to bury almost eight hundred pages from the magazine, so they wouldn't fall into the hands of their...