Music composed by Holocaust victims performed

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In a dramatic example of the strength of the human spirit, some artists found the capacity to create their art even while held in a Nazi concentration camp.\nMusic by four composers who were victims of Nazi persecution will be featured on two evenings next week at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.\nOn Tuesday, the Hawthorne String Quartet will perform Viktor Ullmann's String Quartet No. 3, Opus 43. He composed it at the Theresienstadt camp, where the Nazis had put him in charge of organizing inmates' "leisure" time.\nTheresienstadt was a concentration camp where conditions were far less harsh than most others so Nazis could use it as an example of Nazi camp conditions to show off to the Red Cross and others. The Nazis allowed inmates at Theresienstadt to organize an orchestra.\n"In no way whatsoever did we sit down and weep on the banks of the waters of Babylon," Ullmann wrote in a diary, left behind when he was transferred to Auschwitz. "Our efforts to serve the arts respectfully was proportionate to our will to live, in spite of everything."\nUllmann died in 1944 at Auschwitz, one of the most notorious Nazi death camps.\nThe musical program at the Kennedy Center opens with a song for soprano by Alexander Zemlinsky, with the ironic title "May Flowers Were Blooming Everywhere." Zemlinsky left his music incomplete but the lyric tells of two young lovers: the man dies of summer heat and exhaustion, the girl, wandering under the Christmas lights of inhospitable farms, kills her newborn child and sinks into the snow.\nZemlinsky was a protege of Johannes Brahms and a brother-in-law of composer Arnold Schoenberg. A conductor in Berlin who was partly Jewish, he fled first to Austria when Adolf Hitler took power in Germany, then to Czechoslovakia. Ill and approaching 70, he made his way to the United States at the outbreak of World War II. He died in Larchmont, N.Y., in 1942.\nErwin Schulhoff wrote his "Concerto for String Quartet and Wind instruments" before the Nazis sent him to a camp at Wuelzburg, Bavaria, where he died of tuberculosis in 1942. It will be played as the finale to the program.\nOn Thursday, the full National Symphony Orchestra will play Ullmann's Symphony No. 2. It too was written in Theresienstadt, as a sonata for piano. A German composer, Bernhard Wulff, turned it into a symphony 45 years later from notes Ullmann left on how it might be orchestrated.\nPavel Haas also composed his "Study for String Orchestra" at Theresienstadt. It will be performed just before Ullmann's symphony. Haas also died in Auschwitz.\nJames Conlon will conduct both programs.