On Saturday, January 27, 2024, at 7 p.m., the city of Idar-Oberstein and Schalom e. V. will host an event at the Idar-Oberstein Municipal Theater to commemorate the victims of National Socialism. The event is supported by the Partnership for Democracy in the Birkenfeld National Park District and funded by the Federal Ministry for Families, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth as part of the federal program "Live Democracy!".
Since 2005, the city and the Schalom Association have jointly organized a commemorative event on January 27. This time, after welcoming speeches by Lord Mayor Frank Frühauf and Shalom Chairman Axel Redmer, actor Roman Knižka and the OPUS 45 brass quintet will present the musical reading "Ich wand're durch Theresienstadt". After 2019 with "Es ist geschehen, und folglich kann es wieder geschehen" and 2022 with "Den Nazis eine schallende Ohrfeige versetzen!", this is the third time the ensemble has performed this new project in Idar-Oberstein.
In 1941, the SS set up the Theresienstadt camp in the Bohemian town of Terezín. It served as a prison for 150,000 German, Austrian, Czech and later Dutch and Danish Jews until 1945. They all became victims of the inhuman National Socialist racial ideology. "Ich wand're durch Theresienstadt ..." recalls the incomprehensible suffering, the hopes and the artistic self-assertion of the Jews imprisoned in Theresienstadt. Special attention is paid to the fates of young people at the time. Roman Knižka reads from memoirs by Ruth Klüger, Zvi Cohen, Leo Strauss, Jana Renée Friesová, Helga Hošková-Weissová, Hannelore Brenner-Wonschick and Gerty Spies, among others. Poems and texts by children and young people who were imprisoned in Theresienstadt will be heard, as well as poetry by the writer Ilse Weber, who worked as a children's nurse. The OPUS 45 wind quintet will play compositions by Pavel Haas, Hans Krása, Viktor Ullmann and Gideon Klein, among others. Imprisoned in Theresienstadt and murdered by the National Socialists, the work of these important composers was forgotten for a long time after the end of the Second World War.
- Admission to the commemorative event is free.