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The Terezin Ghetto had a huge art movement. In addition to the Defiant Requiem, people drew, put on plays, performed other types of music, and sang opera.

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Learn more about the camp.

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Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and culture, with biographies, statistics, articles and documents on topics from anti-Semitism to Zionism.

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Use the interactive map to learn how the ghetto was organized.

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This building was used as a home for girls ages 8-16. Art lessons were given here by Friedl Dicker-Brandeisova. In the cellar, rehearsals were held for Verdi's Requiem and Smetana's opera The Bartered Bride. Rafael Schächter, who led many of these rehearsals, was a Romanian conductor, pianist and opera coach of Jewish origin and an organizer of cultural life in Terezín.

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This building was used as a home for girls ages 8-16. Art lessons were given here by Friedl Dicker-Brandeisova. In the cellar, rehearsals were held for Verdi's Requiem and Smetana's opera The Bartered Bride . Rafael Schächter, who led many of these rehearsals, was a Romanian conductor, pianist and opera coach of Jewish origin and an organizer of cultural life in Terezín.

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One of the brave Jews who survived the Terezin Ghetto and participated in the Defiant Requiem.

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Edgar Krasa - Holocaust Survivor 3/15/2013

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We will sing to the Nazis what we cannot say to them.

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We will sing to the Nazis what we cannot say to them.

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Add a comment - what is the significance of this quote?

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Listen to or Watch a performance of Verdi's Requiem.

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University of California Television (UCTV)

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This website is owned by the Rafael Schacter Foundation

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Explore the Terezín ghetto through an interactive map Read the stories of Holocaust survivors Learn about the Foundation's grant program for performances by academic institutions

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The Play - Terezin Children of the Holocaust

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The Play - Terezin Children of the Holocaust

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A play from 1984 based on the Red Cross Visit to the Terezin ghetto.

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The problems of hatred, prejudice, bullying and indifference are present in our communities and in our schools. Unacceptable behavior is tolerated or ignored if it comes from our superstar athletes or the "popular kids." And hatred continues to be a cancer that will devour our souls and leave us only barren shells of what we might have been.

Terezin: Children of the Holocaust, the recipient of the 1984 Children's Television Drama Award, provides an historical context within which to examine these critically important issues. Playwright and director Anna Smulowitz, the daughter of Auschwitz survivors, wrote this play in order to sustain the memory of the victims, including her many family members who did not survive.

Terezin depicts two days in a cell at Terezin or Theresienstadt, a concentration camp outside of Prague that imprisoned many European Jews, including over 15,000 children. The play is the story of six of these children, and chronicles the last two days of their lives at the Terezin concentration camp before being deported to their deaths at Auschwitz. The drama takes place during the International Red Cross inspection of the Terezin concentration camp on June 23, 1944. Each of the six characters, all children, represent one million of the six million Jews who perished during the Holocaust.

While the play suggests the grim reality of what lies ahead, it is also a portrait of the hope that children naturally possess, and how these particular children achieved a triumph of spirit through their personal relationships and their artwork. The play is an impassioned work remembering the more than one million children who became victims of the Nazis.

Terezin can be used to introduce some very difficult subjects to students, such as racism, anti-Semitism, intolerance, bullying, and discrimination, whether on the basis of religion, gender, age, national origin, race or sexual orientation. The play can also serve to educate students about the Holocaust and other devastating chapters in our history, and to ensure that this kind of event never takes place again.

The goal of the play is to spread a profound message of healing and hope, and to help others combat hatred and intolerance. The play has a universal message that "no child is born a racist" and calls on each generation to prevent hatred and violence in today's world.

Terezin has toured schools, colleges and theaters throughout the United States and internationally for over forty years. It has been translated into several languages. The play has been performed at the Edinburgh fringe festival in Scotland, in Germany, including in Berlin and near Frankfurt, as well as at Terezin in the Czech Republic and at Auschwitz in Poland.

In 1984, Terezin was honored with the American Children's Television Drama Award.

Performances of Terezin are approximately 75 minutes and are generally followed by questions and conversations among our cast and the audience. This play is appropriate for children ages 12 and up, as well as for adults.

Click here for reviews of T erezin: Children of the Holocaust.

Click to find out more about booking a performance of Terezin: Children of the Holocaust.

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The Play - Terezin - Children of the Holocaust

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The problems of hatred, prejudice, bullying and indifference are present in our communities and in our schools. Unacceptable behavior is tolerated or ignored if it comes from our superstar athletes or the "popular kids." And hatred continues to be a cancer that will devour our souls and leave us only barren shells of what we might have been.

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Children's drawings from the Theresienstadt 

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Children's drawings from the Theresienstadt 

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A world rarity - the collection of children's drawings from Terezín

This is the largest collection of children's drawings from the period of the Shoah in the world. It contains a total of 4387 drawings by Jewish children who passed through the Terezín Ghetto during the Second World War. All the drawings were made over a short two-year period (1943-44) as part of the drawing classes taught by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898-1944), one of the most outstanding female artists from the interwar avant-garde.

The drawing lessons had a privileged position within the children's care program in the ghetto. Dicker-Brandeis conducted the classes by employing the special experimental methods she adopted by and large from her teacher Johann Itten (1888-1967), but also from other pioneers of experimental art at the State Bauhaus in Weimar, where she studied from 1919 to 1923. In the extreme conditions of the ghetto, these classes became a pillar of the clandestinely organized educational program. Her objective, as she put it, was not to teach the children to be artists but to develop their creative, emotional, and social intellect.

Despite the application of a precise method, Dicker-Brandeis still managed to respect the individuality of each child and allowed them the freedom to express themselves, unleash their fantasies and emotions, and as a result her instruction had an invaluable therapeutic effect. In autumn of 1944 she and the majority of her students were deported East, and with her nearly all of them perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

The four and a half thousand children's drawings from Terezín that Dicker-Brandeis collected after the classes and kept in two suitcases, which she hid in one of the ghetto's children's dormitories before her transport to Auschwitz, has been part of the Jewish Museum in Prague's collection since the end of the war. The drawings have been exhibited all over the world since 1945, and a number of books have been published on them and they have had a leading role in many films, including animated films.

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children's drawings from the Terezín Ghetto | Židovské muzeum v Praze

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A world rarity - the collection of children's drawings from Terezín This is the largest collection of children's drawings from the period of the Shoah in the world. It contains a total of 4387 drawings by Jewish children who passed through the Terezín Ghetto during the Second World War.

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Play written in Terezin Ghetto but never performed finally takes the stage in March 2019

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Play written in Terezin Ghetto but never performed finally takes the stage in March 2019

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The Last Cyclist

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The play was written by a prisoner of a Holocaust-era ghetto. Today, its presence is to be felt locally.

"The Last Cyclist" is being staged April 4-14 at Cardinal Stritch University in Fox Point.

The original version of "The Last Cyclist" was written as a cabaret in 1944 by Karel Svenk, a prisoner in the Terezin Ghetto.

The play is based on "the allegory of lunatics, referring to the Nazis and the cyclists, referring to the Jews," said playwright Naomi Patz, who built and reimagined a new version based on what survived the war from the original.

"This was a really savvy, smart political commentary ... form of resistance," said Cardinal Stritch University Theater Department Director Mark Boergers.

"The Last Cyclist" was written to also be a "laugh-out-loud comedy," Patz said.

The production at Stritch is a "play within a play," and it is "being played to our audience as if our audience was made up of the prisoners," she said.

The set design is a recreation of the Terezin Ghetto, with "lots of bed sheets, rope, found knick-knacks and garbage," Boergers said. The cast includes students and professional actors. "The Last Cyclist" at Stritch is in collaboration with the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center of Milwaukee Jewish Federation and the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, along with the university.

According to Patz, Terezin was full of "the Jewish elite of conductors, artists, actors and composers."

The prisoners only rehearsed the play and never performed it to its intended audience, being the Nazis, because the Council of Jewish Elders was afraid of repercussions, Patz said.

The prisoners put on theatrical productions "to keep up their morale; to keep up on the culture that they knew," she said. They never did a production in the genre of tragedy, she said.

In his directing, Boergers is "seeking to represent their artistic dream world," he said.

The reconstruction of this play has been "a labor of love and homage to these particular prisoners," Patz said.

The production at Stritch has an "abrupt ending, where the conclusion of the rehearsal is news of a round-up," she said. Except for one person, everyone involved in the rehearsals at Terezin, including Svenk, perished in death camps.

Boergers said that there is "sadness and drama in the play, for sure ... and fear involved when you sit back and take in the totality of it all."

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How to go:

What: "The Last Cyclist" play

When: Playwright/director talkback with dessert reception plus live performance on Thursday, April 4 at 7 p.m. More performances through April 14, 2019.

Where: Cardinal Stritch University, 6801 N Yates Road, Fox Point, Nancy Kendall Mainstage Theater in the Joan Steele Stein Center for Communication Studies/Fine Arts building

More info on April 4: HolocaustCenterMilwaukee.org/TheLastCyclist

More info on other dates: Stritch.edu/Events

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Play written in Terezin Ghetto - but never performed ­- to see light

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The play was written by a prisoner of a Holocaust-era ghetto. Today, its presence is to be felt locally. "The Last Cyclist" is being staged April 4-14 at Cardinal Stritch University in Fox Point. The original version of "The Last Cyclist" was written as a cabaret in 1944 by Karel Svenk, a prisoner in the Terezin Ghetto.