Mark Ludwig, Executive Director of Terezín Music Foundation, has a new book, Our Will to Live.
Musician Mark Ludwig has for decades led the effort to promote the music by composers who had been held at the Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp, and in many cases then murdered by the Nazis.
Ludwig has now written a book on the subject, Our Will to Live. The publisher, Steidl Verlag, has produced a related video. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOWPNNW2wyI.
In this Nazi concentration camp in then Czechoslovakia where 33,000 people died, imprisoned musicians and artists created a remarkable cultural community. Ludwig’s book brings us into this world and presents the first full English translation of concert critiques written by accomplished musician, scholar, and Terezín prisoner Viktor Ullmann. He describes Terezín performances by musical luminaries, as well as works by a generation of promising composers silenced too soon: Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas, Hans Krása and others. The book includes more than 250 rarely seen concert posters, programs, portraits, and scenes rendered by imprisoned artists. Our Will to Live also offers an original collection of vintage and modern recordings performed by Terezín survivors and contemporary masters. Essays and annotations by scholar Mark Ludwig provide historical context. Nearly all the artists were murdered in Auschwitz, and Our Will to Live is a tribute to their creativity.