Tuesday 8 March, 5 pm
Unique graffiti along with music and theatre are part of this year’s traditional commemorative event, Memory of BIIb (BIIb is the name for the Auschwitz block that housed the so-called Terezín Family Camp), dedicated to the largest single instance of genocide of Czechoslovak citizens in the country’s history. This year, we commemorate the extermination at the family camp with the premiere of a site-specific documentary, filmed on the premises of the Bubny railway station platform where a significant number of the family camp prisoners began their tragic wartime history.
In the context of the war in Ukraine, the authorial team of Memorial of Silence warns against any tolerance of blatant lies presented as reasons for an aggressive superpower to attack a sovereign state. The historical parallel with the Nazi propaganda that preceded the Munich failure of Western diplomacy yielding to Hitler in 1938 is a serious stigma of early 2022.
The seven-minute documentary can also be found on the Facebook profile of Memorial of Silence.
It features a chamber concert staged on the platform of the Bubny station, with an arrangement that brings together several cultural activities at the place of memory. The concert consists of two Hasidic dances by Zikmund Schul and a fragment of the prelude from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Third Suite in C major performed by cellist Michal Kaňka and violinist Jan Schulmeister.
Against the backdrop of a musical performance set in contemporary railway traffic, the old railway station comes to life with a theatrical rehearsal as students of the Přírodní škola secondary school perform a piece in the departure hall based on an authentic memorial text by Petr Ginz: a poet, artist, and editor of a children’s magazine from Terezín entitled Vedem.
In the documentary, the musicians on the platform of the Bubny station are joined by artists who create unique thematic graffiti inspired by the memories of Dita Krausová. It was designed and spraypainted on the stage surface for the Memorial of Silence gallery by students of the Přírodní škola secondary school: Prokop Císler, Ondřej Fábra, Ondřej Martínek, and Marek Mošnička.
Photo: Bára Lockefeer