Previously unknown notebooks filled with poetry written by her grandmother during her darkest days in a Nazi concentration camp has been brought to light – and set to music – by Northumberland resident, musician and songwriter Lenka Lichtenberg.
Lichtenberg will perform selections from her 16-song album ‘Thieves of Dreams: Songs of Theresienstadt’s Secret Poetess’ at the Brighton Public Library on Tuesday, June 14 from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. She will also be reading several translated poems (originally written in the Czech language), which were written almost 80 years ago when her grandmother, Anna Hana Friesova, was imprisoned in the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp.
“I will be presenting the program as part music performance as well as discussion and spoken word and reading some of these poems and talking about them a little bit in translation. The settings of the poems are in the original (language), so they are in Czech, so nobody would understand much of that. It’s a crazy language,” said Lichtenberg with a laugh during a recent interview.
She hopes her audience will enjoy the music, but noted they will gain a greater appreciation and understanding for her grandmother’s poetry through the spoken word, translated from Czech to English.
“The melodies themselves will carry it, but it’s not about the music really, as much as I hope it is strong and impactful, at the same time I think it’s actually about the poems more than anything – their messages, their themes – and that people would not be able to gain that understanding from listening to them in Czech.”
Lichtenberg emphasized the album is a “hopeful work” and far from depressing.
“It’s important to keep that in mind so you don’t go there prepared to cry all the way and walk out depressed. That’s not at all what I’m trying to do. This is the opposite of that,” said Lichtenberg.
The poems were written by her maternal grandmother between 1942 and 1945 while imprisoned with Lichtenberg’s mother Jana Renee in Theresienstadt, which served as a Nazi transit camp for Czech Jews who were later transported to killing centres like Auschwitz.
Lichtenberg said there are a series of themes within the poetry, mostly about love and relationships, as well as poems of dreams that serve as a form of escape from imprisonment. She notes the subject matter was particularly surprising considering the daily danger and pervasive uncertainly of the concentration camp.
“Even though they were written in a concentration camp, for most of them you would never know judging by what the poetry is about, because my grandmother talks about a marriage breakdown with her husband,” said Lichtenberg. “That in itself is pretty interesting considering the (time) frame in which it was written. At that point anyone more concerned with her marriage not working out rather than the fact that they all could go in a transport to Auschwitz and die the next week. That’s actually not there.” she said
Lichtenberg said she only discovered the notebooks of poetry written by her grandmother approximately a year after her mother’s death in 2016. It was through combing through her mother’s belongings that she discovered the notebooks in a desk. Her first thoughts were of donating the notebooks to a museum.
“It took me probably another year or maybe even two to think of what to do with it. At first I wanted to just give them to a museum, or archives, or something like that because I thought they were very important, possibly, historical documents. Maybe it needs to be just put in a museum, then I thought about it, it was a very personal thing, I will not feel that I’m doing any justice to this beautiful art if it’s sitting behind of glass in some museum, no matter how good of a museum it is. I think it needs its own light and needs to be presented to the world in the best way possible,” she said.
After making the decision to forge ahead with putting her grandmother’s poems to music, she also commissioned six women composers to write the music, thanks to grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
“I did decide I wanted to go with women composers as the poetry is very much that of a women. I wouldn’t really explain that, but it’s very much a women’s perspective, especially on the topic of love and relationships,” said Lichtenberg, adding that eight tracks on the album were composed by others, with the remaining eight songs she composed herself.
After a slow start in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the project to write and record the music picked up steam in 2021. Most of the work was done remotely, she said, with some of the production work done at her Northumberland farm studio.
Lichtenberg feels that her mother and grandmother – especially her grandmother – would be shocked that someone would take such an interest in her work, but she would also be “extremely happy with it”.
“I do think my mom and my grandmother know about this. In fact, they have kind of become part of my life in a very beautiful way through this work. Having their words and their warmth and all this really part of my days for so long it almost feels like they’re really here with me. It’s remarkable really; it’s a beautiful thing that has happened,” she said.
