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Voices of the Children is an Emmy-Award winning documentary film [1] that tells the story of three people who were imprisoned as children in the Terezin concentration camp. 16mm - color - 80min.

Content

The film tells the story of three people who were imprisoned as children in Terezin, the small Czech town that the Nazis converted into a concentration camp for Jews. The filmmaker, who herself spent two years in Terezin, traces the survivors' war experiences, with the help of their personal journals and drawings. She follows their stories through the difficult postwar years into the present, filming the survivors with their families in the three different countries in which they settled, the United States, Austria and the Czech Republic. In the film, parents and children question the need to talk about the past and they explore the effect of the Holocaust on their lives. The daughter of one survivor confronts her father for the first time, saying, "You cannot pretend it did not affect us." In their efforts to use Terezin for propaganda purposes, the Nazis permitted inmates to stage a children's opera called "Brundibar". The survivors attend a performance of Brundibar in Prague and recall the special significance it had fifty years ago. Today the opera symbolizes the lost world of the Terezin children.

Terezin

A concentration camp for Central European Jews, Terezin was also known by its German name, Theresienstadt.

At times, the Nazis used this so-called “model ghetto” for propaganda purposes. In June 1944, after a frenzied period of superficial improvements, they turned parts of the camp into a fake town and agreed to let the International Red Cross inspect it. The presence of uniformed Jewish ghetto police was intended to convey the impression that the camp was governed by Jews.

In reality, the prisoners endured continual hunger, disease, and overcrowding. Of the 140,000 people who passed through Terezin 33,000 died there, mostly of starvation and illness. The inmates lived with the constant threat of deportation, as they were regularly transported to Auschwitz and other camps in Poland.

Yet Terezín was not a place of unrelieved horror. Between transports, some of the well-known musicians and performers who were among the prisoners were allowed to stage operas, plays, concerts and cabarets. Ironically, their theatrical productions were often freer of censorship than those in the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe, as the Nazis did not bother to censor the inmates whom they considered doomed.

Brundibar

"Brundibar," tells the story of Pepicek and his sister Aninka whose ailing mother desperately needs milk, but the village milkman won't give it away.

Pepicek and Aninka try to earn money by singing for the town’s people, but the greedy organ grinder, Brundibar ("bumblebee" in Czech), drowns out their song. When three animals help rally the town's children to help Pepicek and Aninka, the nasty Brundibar is vanquished.

Just before its premiere in 1942 at the Jewish boys' orphanage in Prague, its composer, Hans Krasa, was sent to Terezint and Rudolph Freudenfeld, the conductor of the premiere performances, took the score with him when he and the boys from the orphanage were also sent to Terezin.It was performed at the camp 55 times, providing distraction and perhaps a small respite from the misery. But it was also exploited by the Nazis for propaganda purposes in their attempts to present Terezin as a”model camp”. Ultimately, Krasa, most of his collaborators on the project and nearly all of the children who performed in it were killed at Auschwitz.

Awards

1999 Emmy for best historical program

Certificate of Merit, Chicago International Film Festival

1998 Gold Plaque, Chicago International Television Competition

1998 Best Documentary and Audience Choice for Best Documentary, Film Fest New Haven

1997 Silver Apple, National Educational Media Network

Comments

"Intimate without being intrusive, sensitive without a jot of sentimentality." - New York Jewish Week

"...an important contribution to the cinematic and historical record...a significant addition to our understanding of one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century." – Variety

Credits

Written and directed by Zuzana Justman, Produced by Jiri Jezek and Robert Kanter. Director of Photography: Ervin Sanders and Austin de Besche, Editor: David Charap Distributor: The Cinema Guild Distributor: Ergo Media, Inc