Jocelyn Pook's Drawing Life tours the UK
15th January 2016
In composing the piece, Jocelyn Pook spoke to Holocaust survivor Zdenka Fantlova, after reading her moving book The Tin Ring. Born in Czechoslovakia, Fantlova spent time in Terezin, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and weighed only 77lbs when she was rescued by a British Army officer in 1945. Her book, The Tin Ring, takes its name from the handmade tin ring she was given by her young lover on the last occasion she saw him.
Terezin was a walled 18th century garrison town in former Czechoslovakia used as a concentration camp for more than 150,000 Jews. Between 1941 and 1944, of the 15,000 children deported there and then to Auschwitz, only 100 survived. The children’s poems and drawings, stuffed into walls or buried outside, are a moving testament to the prisoners' resilience. Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, a Terezin inmate, who was an artist and educator before the war, organised art classes for the child inmates, seeing art as a way for the young to express themselves. Helga Weiss on her father’s advice was encouraged “to draw what you see” and depicted the intimate details of camp life in her drawings.
As Sophie Solomon, Artistic Director of the Jewish Music Institute, explains:
“Living conditions in Terezin were appalling. Inmates were crammed together, ravaged by starvation, disease and brutality. But the story of the camp demonstrates the enormous strength of the human spirit even amid the horror of the Holocaust.”
Jocelyn Pook commented:
“The Jewish Music Institute approached me to compose a piece inspired by the poems and drawings of Terezin’s children. What shines through in these works, and also in many survivors’ testimonies, is the capacity to find hope, courage and beauty in the direst and bleakest of circumstances. It is about the human ability to find ways to nourish and strengthen the spirit even in the harshest conditions, against all the odds. This piece will, I hope, be reflective without being devoid of light.”
Previously winner of the David Bedford Music Education Award in 2014, which recognised exceptional music education projects involving composers and new music, this National Tour of Drawing Life is the recipient of funding from the Arts Council England.
For more information and to book tickets for the performance at Milton Court, Barbican, January 30, 8pm click here
