{"id":22521,"date":"2025-01-29T08:50:34","date_gmt":"2025-01-29T13:50:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/worldscreen.com\/"},"modified":"2025-01-30T11:45:54","modified_gmt":"2025-01-30T16:45:54","slug":"commemorating-auschwitzs-liberation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/commemorating-auschwitzs-liberation\/","title":{"rendered":"Commemorating Auschwitz\u2019s Liberation"},"content":{"rendered":"

January 27, known as Holocaust Remembrance Day, marked 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp. BBC Arts tapped Two Rivers Media to commemorate the event with the feature documentary The Last Musician of Auschwitz<\/em>. The 90-minute doc was co-funded by Access, which also had a hand in the Oscar-winning Holocaust drama\u00a0The Zone of Interest<\/em>\u00a0and the documentary\u00a0The Commandant\u2019s Shadow<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAccess has a particular commitment to Holocaust education, and we believe we can make a contribution through powerful content,\u201d Danny Cohen, president of Access, tells\u00a0TV Real Weekly<\/em>. \u201cThere are only so many projects we can take on, so we are very selective and look for projects that we believe can have a global impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Last Musician of Auschwitz\u00a0<\/em>tells the story of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who, along with other victims of Auschwitz, played and created music amid the terrors of the Holocaust. The film tells how prisoners were secretly composing music while in the camps, a powerful testament to the human spirit and the power of creativity despite living in the most brutal and dehumanizing of conditions. The documentary features Lasker-Wallfisch, now 99 years old, who is the only living musician to have played in one of the Auschwitz orchestras.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have been developing and producing\u00a0The Last Musician of Auschwitz<\/em>\u00a0for almost two and a half years,\u201d says Alan Clements, managing director and executive producer at Two Rivers Media. \u201cThroughout that time, it has changed shape and direction, but Anita\u2019s story as the last surviving member of the women\u2019s orchestra was always going to be at its heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clements says it has been \u201cbrilliant to work closely with Anita and her family throughout the process and genuinely wonderful that her son, Raphael, is a key performer in the documentary. His performance on the cello of Schumann\u2019s \u2018Tr\u00e4umerei,\u2019 a piece that Anita had been forced to play for Doctor Josef Mengele, Auschwitz\u2019s infamous \u2018Angel of Death,\u2019 was incredibly poignant, especially as that music celebrates childhood at a place where so many children were being tortured and murdered.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnita has spoken before, but we felt the mix of contemporary interview and a young actress speaking her memoirs was a powerful combination.\u201d<\/p>\n

The doc also weaves in the stories of four other musicians from all over Europe, now dead but whose music and words live on: from Krakow, classically trained pianist Adam Kopyci\u0144ski; from Paris, composer Szymon Laks; from Berlin, choirmaster Martin Rosenberg, known as Rosebery d\u2019Arguto; and, from Prague, singer-songwriter Ilse Weber. It includes a newly discovered work by Weber, never performed since the war, and a lullaby by Kopyci\u0144ski, written in Auschwitz itself, recorded for the first time.<\/p>\n

\u201cDirector Toby Trackman beautifully combined a variety of techniques to tell this compelling story,\u201d Clements says. \u201cAs well as intimate interviews with Anita and the families of the other musicians featured, he creatively used archive and stark but powerful graphics inspired by musical notation to knit the film together. He also brought written testimonies and letters to life using actors delivering arresting monologues direct to camera. Then, of course, there are the powerful musical performances around Auschwitz itself\u2014each was chosen not just for its link to one or other of the musicians we feature but also to move the bigger story we try to tell about the Holocaust, too. In one of the last sections of the film, to hear Liv Migdal perform \u2018Wiegala,\u2019 the lullaby that Ilse Weber sang to the children in her charge in the gas chamber, is unbelievably moving.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cohen adds, \u201cThe documentary uses music and song in a way that is very moving indeed. Through this music, we learn not just about what happened at Auschwitz but the way in which music became a source of hope and resistance for those trapped in the hell that the Nazis had created.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for what they hope viewers take away from having watched\u00a0The Last Musician of Auschwitz<\/em>, Cohen says: \u201cThat even in a place of such darkness, music was something that helped people stay alive, retain their humanity and hope for a brighter future.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe documentary\u2019s combination of first-person testimony, musical performance and dramatic reconstruction is highly ambitious, making the film a very distinctive and unique experience for international audiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clements adds, \u201cThere are many Holocaust documentaries, but we truly feel we have created something fresh and distinctive that will, hopefully, stimulate new audiences to reflect on the greatest crime in human history.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alan Clements and Danny Cohen discuss The Last Musician of Auschwitz.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":350,"featured_media":22522,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-features","category-top-stories","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"\nCommemorating Auschwitz\u2019s Liberation - TVREAL<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/commemorating-auschwitzs-liberation\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Commemorating Auschwitz\u2019s Liberation - TVREAL\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Alan Clements and Danny Cohen discuss The Last Musician of Auschwitz.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/commemorating-auschwitzs-liberation\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"TVREAL\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2025-01-29T13:50:34+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2025-01-30T16:45:54+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/12\/2025\/01\/Danny-Cohen.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"546\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"337\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Kristin Brzoznowski\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Kristin Brzoznowski\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/commemorating-auschwitzs-liberation\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvreal\/commemorating-auschwitzs-liberation\/\",\"name\":\"Commemorating Auschwitz\u2019s Liberation - 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