Centralight

The garden is glorious with spring blossom, Paradise on earth it is to see. Where is my home, where is my home? Water roars across the meadows, Pinewoods rustle among crags, And this is that beautiful land, The Czech land, my home, The Czech land, my home. The elementary-aged children fidgeted in their ladybug costumes backstage, peering nervously into the audience while the notes of the Czech national anthem rose up to the sloping roof beams of the attic theater. It was 1943. There were tickets, backdrops, stage lights with colored gels, costumes, musical accompaniment – all the trappings of a regular stage performance – but this was not like any other. The performers, the children of home L410, all were prisoners. The setting was Terezín concentration camp. And for many of those children, it would be the last stage appearance of their lives. Life in Terezín Lauren McConnell, assistant professor in communication and dramatic arts at CMU, has spent the past two years researching the performances of "The Fireflies" in the Terezín concentration camp, situated in the Czech Republic. She recently completed a fellowship with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and is teaching a course on theater and the Holocaust. camp. It did have more resources than a typical concentration camp. At different times in its history, it played different roles." In the beginning, Terezín was billed as a "resort-like" camp for Jewish aristocrats. It was governed by a council of Jewish elders, who were given the task of settling disputes and doling out rations. But as World War II progressed, Terezín heaved with 57,000 inhabitants. It became a way station for prisoners on their way to Auschwitz and other death camps. "It is pretty bizarre," McConnell acknowledges the notion of concentration camp prisoners performing plays and musicals while imprisoned. "But there is a complexity to the story. Terezín was a very unique The camp also was used as a public relations tool to showcase to the world audience the "positive" aspects of daily life for the prisoners – "a place to hide what the Nazis were doing to the Jews," says McConnell. This included performances of "The Fireflies" for dignitaries, such as those from the International Red Cross. "They cleaned up the whole camp and made it look like Disneyland," she says. "The kids were told to spend some time under a sun lamp. It was crazy the sort of things that they were doing." The real story is that most of the children from Terezín would not survive the war. 'Spring is Coming' Despite its use for propaganda purposes, "The Fireflies" became one of the many tools that adults in the camp used to educate and instill values in the children, under a regime that forbade them to use traditional education methods. The play was based on an old beloved Eastern European coming- of-age story about a young firefly and his quest for love. "One of the accomplishments of the adults was to protect the children," says McConnell. "Part of the purpose of the show originally was to be an activity for the children." McConnell has been working with survivor testimonies to piece together the details of the performances. Many of the survivors remember these performances as a happy memory – but at least one survivor remembered being afraid during the performance that she would be transported out of the camp after the show ended. "The Nazis had a policy of killing younger children that didn't have any use," she says. When McConnell asked another survivor to listen to one of the songs from the play, "Spring is Coming," his eyes welled with tears. "Many people talked particularly about this song," she says. "For them it symbolized the hope that the war would soon be coming to an end." An encore performance McConnell will resurrect "The Fireflies" with a performance at CMU this spring, with CMU students taking the stage, and also giving performances for area youth. The performance will be particularly memorable because of one person: Michaela Vidláková, one of the Holocaust survivors who first saw "The Fireflies" in Terezín when she was 6 years old, will serve as narrator for the play that once offered a glimmer of hope in a place of so much darkness. • 14 centralight winter '12

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