An inmate of Theresienstadt concentration camp who took part in a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem, staged by the Nazis to deceive Red Cross visitors, has died.
Edgar Krasa, who was deported to Theresienstadt in 1941 and subsequently survived Auschwitz, passed away in Boston, Massachusetts, last Monday.
After the war he spent 10 years in Israel where he founded a school for cooks. He then migrated to Boston, where he ran a restaurant.
The Theresienstadt chorus was led by the Czech-born composer Rafael Schachter, who was Mr Krasa’s bunkmate.
A spokesperson for the Defiant Requiem Foundation, which performs the music created by inmates at Theresienstadt, told the Forward: “Edgar provided living testimony to the extraordinary events that unfolded in Rafael Schachter’s choir at Terezin.”
By 1944, the date of the Requiem sung by Mr Krasa, Mr Schachter had led many performances of the work, most of which sung by choirs that had been subsequently deported to Auschwitz.
Late in the war, the Nazis had designated Theresienstadt as a tool in their propaganda war, and promoted it as a “model” camp where Jews and other inmates could be seen to have a rich cultural and sporting life.
Buildings were cleaned up and a performance of the Requiem was ordered in order to fool a Red Cross delegation invited to the camp in 1944.
American conductor Murray Sidlin, who met Mr Krasa after he moved to the US, wrote: "Through Edgar [Krasa], I learned that the Requiem was a code. It talks about the end of the world and what happens to those who commit evil. Even as they were facing their own destruction, the Jews in that choir were telling the Nazis how the Third Reich was doomed."
