Edinburgh Fringe 2024
The Secret Poetess of Terezin
Lenka Lichtenberg
Genre: Live Music, Spoken Word
Venue: theSpace
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Canadian artist Lenka Lichtenberg has created The Secret Poetess one-woman play to bring to life the writings of her grandmother, who was a prisoner from 1942 to 1945 in Theresienstadt, or Terezin, in Czechoslovakia. Lichtenberg has set some select pieces to music and weaves a story through the prose and the songs.
Review
Close your eyes and just listen. You hear exotic melodies and expressive lyrics. These are the words of a poet in a concentration camp during World War II, set to new music. They are filled with passion, hope, and dreams, written in an unimaginable situation. The music composed to the poems transports you to that place. The music is gentle, lively, and sensitive. The singing is a perfect match for the messages.
Canadian artist Lenka Lichtenberg created The Secret Poetess one-woman play to bring to life writings of her grandmother. In 2018, Lenka discovered two notebooks of poems and prose written by her grandmother, who was a prisoner from 1942 to 1945 in Theresienstadt, or Terezin, in Czechoslovakia.
Terezín was a concentration camp near Prague in the famed fortress Theresienstadt, which was created by Emperor Joseph II of Austria in the late 18th century and named in honor of his mother, Empress Maria Theresa. Jewish cultural elites from across Europe, including scholars, philosophers, scientists, visual artists, and many famous musicians, were brought to Terezín before being shipped to the gas chambers. Despite the conditions of starvation, cruelty, and death, music and art flourished in the Terezín Ghetto, providing a way for artists to retain their identity.
Czech composer Rafael Schächter conducted an adult chorus of 150 Jews for 16 performances of the Verdi’s dramatic and complex “Requiem”. Viktor Ullmann penned essays, three piano sonatas, a string quartet, several dozen Lieder, orchestral works, an opera and vocal arrangements of Yiddish and Hebrew songs. Among many pieces, Pavel Haas wrote the Study for Strings, immortalized in a 1944 Nazi propaganda film created to show Terezin as an idyllic spa for Jews.
And Lichtenberg’s grandmother wrote. She penned stories and poems of love received, embraced, rejected, and lost, of dreams and relationships flourishing and extinguishing under Nazi occupation. These writings formed the lyrical basis for Lichtenberg’s “Thieves of Dreams” album and this Fringe show.
Lichtenberg’s “Babinka” (grandmother) Anna Hana Friesova was a multi-talented woman who played piano, was an athlete, and mastered many languages. But she never spoke about herself. The poems that she penned revealed her secret world. They are sensuous and descriptive. Anna had lived through the heartbreak of a lost love, the invasion of her homeland by the German army, the loss of her business, rationing and restrictions, and her husband’s arrest by the Gestapo.
In 1942, Anna and her family were forced to leave their home and join hundreds of others on a train to Terezin. They even had to walk with all of their belongings the final seven kilometers to the camp.
Despite the hardships, Anna wrote delicious poetry. She found beauty all around her even in the betrayal and loss. She wrote of how people are mistreated by the ones they love. There is rage in some of the writing and the realization of her potential death. She wrote “our clock is stopping soon and no one will wind it up”. The only safe place for her was in her imagination. Her paradise was solitude. These are vivid images portrayed on stage by Lichtenberg.
In 1945, Terezin was liberated by the Russian army. Anna went home and rebuilt her husband’s business, remarried, and had a new life for another fifteen years. She was a survivor. She died at the age of 86.
Lichtenberg has set select poems and prose to music, effectively weaving the story of Anna’s life through the songs. Some of the compositions are lilting soundscapes. Some have memorable “hooks” that will stay in your head as you leave the performance. The melodies are both elegant and haunting, following the movement of the texts. Tunes are in English and Czech, as Lichtenberg fluidly moves between languages to paint a vivid picture of the stories, sung with affection and compassion. She deftly accompanies herself on piano as well as adding depth to the pieces with lush soundtracks. The staging includes a photo of Anna. The lighting heightens the drama throughout.
Lichtenberg is clearly passionate about the story and the family relationships. She welcomes us into her private world and takes us on a immersive and moving family journey. Lichtenberg is keeping the memories of Anna’s work alive with her lyrical singing and the beautiful melodies that enchant and engage the audience.
From a total of 141,000 prisoners in Theresienstadt, only about 23,000 – just 100 of the children – lived to see the end of the war. The music and poetry from Terezín continue on as an affirmation of the human spirit.
Lichtenberg is a Canadian musician, composer, and producer who draws on the rich, intercultural Toronto soundscapes she has long immersed herself in, to create her own unique global sound. The 2023 JUNO Award, Canadian Folk Music and International Independent Music Award winner aspires to build bridges among cultures and transcend the artificial boundaries between folk, jazz and world music in a passionate and often deeply spiritual celebration of her roots. The multilingual vocalist has been a prolific collaborator and has also released seven albums.
