‘Don’t
Forget about Me’ chronicles
the extraordinary
and moving story about the young Czech pianist and composer Gideon Klein.
Standing on the threshold of what was to be an auspicious career, Klein’s
musical activities in Prague were ruptured, as he, his family and friends were
deported, interned in the Terezin (Theresienstadt) prison camp and ghetto.
There his life took an even more unexpected turn, as he galvanised prisoners
into an astonishing array of musical activities, and he composed his finest
and most compelling music. Until recently, Klein’s music
has largely been performed within the context of Holocaust memorialisation.
But events commemorating the Klein centenary in 2019 offered audiences and
musicians the opportunity to re-assess and reposition Klein’s place in the
history of twentieth-century music and European modernism. David Fligg’s
monograph on Klein, the first in a quarter of a century, continues this
process.
Drawing on hitherto unpublished
archival sources, interviews with Holocaust survivors who were imprisoned
with him, many rare photographs and detailed musical analysis, ‘Don’t
forget about me’ recounts Klein’s life from his Moravian childhood (he
was born in Prerov in 1919),
charting the development of his musical talent. It presents the first
detailed examination of how the teenage Klein engaged with the numerous
artistes who were at the centre of the vibrant cultural environment of
pre-war Prague. Klein was finally transported to an isolated and bleak
Auschwitz sub-camp, in the freezing closing weeks of 1944, where he was
killed in a massacre by the retreating prison guards.
His story, along with the
compositions which remarkably survived Terezin, is one of the most
fascinating of Czech Jews during the Holocaust, and documents how one young
man continued to make music in the face of evil.
