‘Really powerful’ cantata marks Holocaust observance

KINGSTON — The last notes of music faded, the audience gave the Arcadia Chorale a standing ovation, and many of the 170 people who attended the Friedman JCC’s Yom HaShoah Day of Remembrance service on Tuesday evening seemed to be quietly, solemnly affected by what they’d just heard.

“That was amazing,” said Mary Ann Butera, a great-grandmother from Wilkes-Barre. “So sad.”

“Really powerful,” said David Schwager, head of the JCC’s Holocaust Remembrance Committee and a second-generation survivor.

“I take a tissue every time I come to something like this,” said Elly Miller of Shavertown, another second generation survivor.

“Something like this” was the Holocaust Cantata, an hour of music and narration that told stories, in words written by people who had imprisoned in concentration camps during the Holocaust.

In one narration, for example, a teen-age girl recounted how Nazis had taken over her village. Her mother disguised her as an old lady and took her to the countryside, where she could hide in the attic of people she didn’t really know.

Then the mother received an official notice from the mayor of the town. SS soldiers were looking for teenagers. If the girl did not return and give herself up, her entire family would be taken away.

“I knew what I had to do,” wrote the girl, who soon found herself, along with 19 other young women, escorted onto a cattle car to be taken to a camp.

After that moving narration, the singers launched into a searing, beautiful but agonizing song in which baritone soloist Erik Tofte sang of running after a train that was carrying his beloved away.

And, under the skillful bow of cellist Gayle Klaber, her instrument sounded like a person groaning in agony, just as Arcadia Chorale vice president Llewellyn Miller had predicted it would.

Another narration that had audience members wiping away tears told of six babies born in the hospital at a concentration camp. The mothers sang lullabies in their different languages to the newborns, and believed that because they had been allowed to give birth, their babies would be allowed to live.

But, according to the narration, the six babies were“needled,” a term for a fatal poison injected into the heart. The mothers met the same fate.

There were stories of defiance, too — of prisoners who realized that barrels of wine had been delivered to a camp, and they spread the word it was vinegar so the guards would leave it alone and they’d be free to drink it.

In another story a witness described watching as a young man, one of 12 men condemned to be hanged, pushed away the bucket on which he was standing in order to kill himself rather than be killed.

It was “one final act of resistance,” read the Rev. Dr. Robert Zanicky from First Presbyterian Church, who was one of several clergy representing various denominations who took part in the Yom HaShoah Day of Remembrance.

Earlier, Cantor Ahron Abraham and Rabbi Larry Kaplan had opened the ceremony with a solemn El Malei prayer, in English and Hebrew, in honor of the 6 million Jews who perished during the Holocaust between 1933 and 1945.

As for the singers, they’d been rehearsing the music for weeks, chorale president Evelyn Munley said Tuesday. “We still get teary-eyed.”

“We’re trying to imagine ourselves in (the prisoners’) place,” Llewellyn Miller said. “The only thing they had to sustain themselves was each other. And maybe a crust of bread. And a song.”

Audience member Krista Connelly, on her way out of the auditorium, said she would like to visit Poland some day, “but I don’t think I’m brave enough to tour a camp.”

But if people had to endure such horrors, a bystander suggested, “the least we can do is listen and learn.”