On a drizzly, cold Thursday morning, October 17, 1991, I found myself in a darkened grove of chestnut trees, thinking again how the past 24 years of my life have been shaped by a chance musical encounter.
Barely a month before this particular Thursday morning, Bob Frye, TV producer with Bolthead Communications, had called to invite me to go to Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia. I was to travel to the prison-city itself with a camera crew and the international tour choir of the American Boychoir of Princeton, New Jersey, to dedicate the new Jewish Museum in Theresienstadt. This was the 50th anniversary of its opening as a way-station for Jews on their way to almost certain death at Auschwitz, and also as a decoy for the International Red Cross visit there during World War II. The American Boychoir would perform my song cycle I Never Saw Another Butterfly, (which I had written to poetry created by the children of Terezin). They would perform with a symphony orchestra in Prague and in Brno, and also at the official opening of the museum. I accepted the invitation but with trepidation; it was an honor which both delighted, and for some reason, also frightened me.
I didn't know what to expect from such a trip. I am now at the age that the authors of the poems would have been had they lived. The poetry had become so much a part of my own persona and was so integrated with my music that, now, in retrospect; I believe that I expected to confront my own self in the barracks of Terezin.
Upon entering Terezin I saw stores, wide open streets, a few people walking, children playing, schools in session. Where was the sober reality of the place? Where were the black crepe banners and the smells of death once removed? I was totally unprepared to see a small city with real people in it, inhabited as indeed it was in 1941 before the Nazis ordered the small population out to make way for the Jews who would soon cram the streets, the houses, the barracks by the thousands. I knew Terezin only from the children's poetry; the small streets of their prose, the little houses and bunks of their fears; I understood the reality of the place from the perspective of a child's imagination.
The next morning, we walked through the wet streets to an imposing building in which the choir would rehearse. The auditorium was, in fact, used for performances by the children who had lived in the barracks 50 years ago.
It was a small, perfect hall now bright with klieg lights\the doors were open to the damp, drizzle and cold because of the heat. I sat in a great comfortable chair, adjusted my camera, ready to photograph the survivors as they came in, listening to the boys sing, being stopped, starting again, rehearsing meticulously as they always did. Suddenly, as the boys sang the exact words "...only I never saw another butterfly," a large, brilliantly blue butterfly flew into the room through an outside door and circled over the boys heads. Still singing, they twisted their heads to keep the butterfly in view as it circled the stage again and flew around the outer periphery of the hall. I tried to find it with my camera, as did the TV people, but in spite of our efforts it eluded us and finally flew out an open door. The boys stopped singing and we all looked at one another. What was a butterfly doing outside in rainy, cold weather to begin with? It was, after all, a cold and wet October in Czechoslovakia. Its significance became more important the longer we thought about its strange appearance. It was as if something or someone had visited us to bestow a blessing. We accepted it as such.
I had to leave right after the performance. As I looked around for the last time and watched those former inmates of this place, now strolling casually arm-in- arm, some in conversation, others quiet in their reflections; I recited aloud the poem On a Sunny Evening, written in 1944 by children of Terezin:
On a purple sunshot evening under wideflow'ring chestnut trees,
upon the thresholdfull of dust
yesterday the days are all like these trees
flower forth in beauty,
lovely too their very wood all gnarled and old,
that I am half afraid to peer into their crowns of green and gold.
The sun has made a veil of gold so lovely that my body aches,
above the heavens shriek with blue
convinced I've smiled by some mistake.
The world's a-bloom and wants to smile,
I want to fly but where, how high? I want to fly.
If in barbed wire things can bloom, why couldn't I?
I will not die, I will not die.