Review

When DISCoveries editor David Olds approached me about reviewing a CD of satirical songs written inside the Theresienstadt concentration camp, we both expressed our reservations about it. But curiosity (and the fact that the World Jewish Congress sponsored the project) got me to listen.

KAMP! Songs and Satire from Theresienstadt is the first English recording of songs written and performed by some (of the many) Jewish poets, composers, musicians and cabaret stars imprisoned in Theresienstadt (1942-44), and marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of that infamous “model ghetto.”

These songs were brought to light, given life and presented in a cabaret-like setting in Vienna in 1992. Russian-Jewish pianist and composer, Sergei Dreznin, served both at the piano and as music director. Dreznin, who also wrote several new melodies to existing poems, went on to direct an English version called KAMP! in 1994. The eponymous CD is the culmination of Dreznin’s 20-plus-year-resolve to keep alive this material created as a means of survival, a way for prisoners to mock their unbearable circumstances and maintain their sanity.

The material is indeed subversive and unsettling. It is also brilliantly executed by Dreznin and singing actors Amelia DeMayo and Curt Buckler.

If nothing else, KAMP!, with its gallows humour and shades of Tom Lehrer, G&S, Weill, Brecht, Brel and Brooks (Mel), deserves a listen for its celebration of the human spirit. To quote Dreznin, “I hope you will laugh. You will cry. And you will definitely learn.”