FULL ART FROM ASHES VEDEM The Boys of Terezin (Lori Laitman) Seattle WA 2026 Vanessa Isiguen, Martin Bakar

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: ART FROM ASHES VEDEM The Boys of Terezin  
• Composer: Lori Laitman   
• Libretto: David Mason    Libretto Text, Libretto Index
• Venue & Opera Company: Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall - Benaroya Hall, Seattle, WA  
• Recorded: January 26, 2026
• Type: Staged Opera Live
• Singers: Vanessa Isiguen, Martin Bakari
• Conductor: Jacob Winkler  
• Orchestra: MOR Ensemble  
• Chorus: Northwest Boychoir  
• Chorus Master: Jacob Winkler  
• Stage Director:   
• Costume Designer:   

Information about the Recording

• Published by: Music of Remembrance (MOR)  
• Date Published: 2026  
• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
• Subtitles: yessubs, ensubs, gensubs  

• ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

  The fate of children in the Holocaust represents a uniquely haunting tragedy. It has been estimated that over one million children were murdered under Nazi rule. Children had even smaller chances of surviving than adults. In Terezín alone, some 15,000 children under the age of fifteen passed through the concentration camp between 1942 and 1944. Only a few hundred were alive at the end of the war.

  Terezín’s Jewish Council of Elders sought to ease the ordeal facing the camp’s children by placing them in buildings where conditions were better than in the barracks housing most adults. By February 1942, the first children’s homes were established. Building L410 became a home for girls, Building L 417 a boy’s dormitory. Each room in these buildings was assigned an adult leader.

  Valtr Eisinger, an imaginative and farsighted educator, was the leader of the 14-year-old boys in Building L417’s room designated as Home One. He helped the boys to imagine their room as an idealistic society called The Republic of Shkid, a cryptic reference to a Russian book that used this acronym for a school for homeless orphans. The boys in Home One were united in mutual support, and they sang an anthem that pledged faith in the ideals of peace, equality and brotherhood.

  The boys created poetry, essays and illustrations for a clandestine magazine that they called “Vedem” (Czech for “In the Lead”). Every Friday night for two years between 1942 and 1944, they read aloud their week’s contributions and began by singing the “Shkid Anthem.” Their writings reveal inspirational courage, passionate idealism, and wisdom far beyond the years of their young authors.

  They also display amazing literary talent. At age fourteen, Petr Ginz became “Vedem’s” first
  and only editor-in-chief. At age sixteen, he was sent to his death in Auschwitz. Sidney Taussig, the only boy from Home One to remain in Terezín until the end of the war, had the foresight to bury 800 pages of the manuscript, and he and his father returned with it to Prague after liberation. These pages give us a precious glimpse of the world of boys torn from their childhoods and separated from their families. The words tell of the boys’ experience in the camp, and of the dreams for a better world that that only a few of them would live to see.

  Selections from “Vedem” were compiled in the book “We Are Children Just the Same.” In 2010, Music of Remembrance commissioned composer Lori Laitman and librettist David Mason to create an oratorio based on this work. Laitman set six of the boys’ original verses; librettist David Mason created poetic lyrics about the boys’ lives in Terezín, their hopes and fears, and their will to create
  beauty even in the face of unimaginable suffering. “The soul cannot believe that we will die / so we make beauty to delay our death,” goes one couplet.

  About one hundred boys passed through Terezín’s Home One; fifteen of them were known to have survived the Holocaust. At the time of the world premiere, six were alive, living across four countries on three continents. We were deeply honored that four of them travelled to Seattle in May 2010 for
  the world premiere of “Vedem.” MOR’s documentary film “The Boys of Terezín” shares the story of the boys of Terezín’s Home One, their secret magazine “Vedem,” and the unlikely reunion of these four survivors in Seattle, 65 years later, at a MOR concert in their honor.

  (Visited 23 times, 1 visits today)