YAD VASHEM
Those of us who lived through the years of the Holocaust have a continuing duty to remember that atrocity, to memorialize it, and to pass on knowledge and understanding of it to younger and future generations.
That duty has already been discharged in many ways, in many places. But it is not a duty that can ever be seen as fulfilled — not if we mean to ensure that such things never happen again.
Foremost, in the remembrances, is Yad Vashem in Israel; and there are notable Holocaust museums, of similar intent, in Washington and Toronto. Historians like Martin Gilbert have given meticulous and detailed accounts which establish the appalling truth, and which expose the Holocaust-deniers as vicious liars. Survivors have recorded their memoirs on camera; and two of them, Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, wrote important books about Auschwitz and the death-march, that transcend the dreadful facts and rise to the level of great literature. Poets, painters, and sculptors have all contributed to the collective act of memory and conscience, which is required of all artists who confront the face of history. At least one major composer, Arnold Schoenberg, responded with a major work; and other composers, too, have addressed the subject. Television has broadcast several sensitive and responsible documentaries. And radio, with its greater flexibility, has broadcast all kinds of programs that reflect the impact of Shoah in one way or another: dramas, tape-documentaries, scripted documentaries, features, and music.
On CBC radio, in the field of the spoken word, four significant programs could be mentioned: dramatized versions of Primo Levi’s first two books, a feature on the Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, and a text-for-voices on the history of anti-Semitism. All these, though, were adaptations of existing materials. They have their place, proper and rewarding, on a network schedule. But radio is also capable of original, creative work, and one piece of that sort stands out as an inspired response to the tragedy of the Nazi genocide.
Saul Chapman, in Toronto, is a devout observant Jew and an accomplished composer. In the nineteen-sixties, on a CBC commission, he composed a Holocaust Cantata, entitled Yad Vashem, for a small ensemble of wind and percussion accompanying three vocal forces: a soprano singer, a speaker reading a poem, and a pre-taped recitation of the names of Holocaust victims.
The soprano sang a wordless vocalise, rooted in the cantorial tradition, giving voice, over a huge range, to the powerful emotions aroused by the subject. The reader spoke an English translation of the poem “Shemá”, by Primo Levi, which prefaces his Auschwitz memoir. These two performers, with their instrumental accompaniment, were the foreground plane of the work. In the background mostly, the pre-taped recitation of victims’ names occasionally poked through into the foreground, giving a special poignancy to the work by thrusting upon listeners the recognition that here, in case after case, was the ineradicable fact of a human life brutally extinguished.
The performance of the cantata was mounted in Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, in the presence of the congregation. Its effect on such an audience was predictably moving. Afterwards, many members of the congregation lined up, one by one, to speak to Chapman, to express to him their heartfelt thanks for what he had done. At the end of the line-up, diffident and in tears, was a little old man who had listened intently, he said, to the background recitation of names; and in there, he said, “I heard the name of my own daughter”.
It is at such a moment that art and real life converge in the most extraordinary way. Nothing can ever put the Holocaust to rest, or assuage the anguish of the bereaved. But when a talented creative artist responds to such a history with an unflinching recognition of its meaning, it is an affirmation of that human spirit which the Holocaust tried, in the end unsuccessfully, to destroy.
