Greta Klingsberg / Greta Hofmeister (F / Austria, 1929), Holocaust survivor
Greta Klingsberg / Greta Hofmeister (F / Austria, 1929), Holocaust survivor
- One of the main interpreters of Brundibar
- KEYWORDS : <Theresienstadt> <Brundibar> <Auschwitz> (other camps) <Liberation of Theresienstadt>
Orphaeus.news
Greta Klingsberg, born September 11, 1929 as Grete Hofmeister in Vienna, singer, translator, former employee of Kol Israel (Israel Radio). 1938 Exile to Czechoslowakia. While her parents left with an illegal ship to Palestine, Greta and her little sister Trude (photo r.) were 'temporarily' left behind in a childrens' home in Brno, in order to avoid risks - children were not allowed on this ship - and get them an offical immigration certificate to Palestine. When in March 1939 the Germans occupied Czechoslowakia, everything had changed; the parents were not able to get them out of the country anymore, the childrens' home was closed and the children were transferred to a Jewish orphanage. In 1942 Grete and Trude, together with all the children of the orphanage were deported to concentration camp Terezín. There Greta performed the leading girls' part 'Aninká' in Hans Krása's childrens' opera 'Brundibár 'over 50 times. In 1944 she was deported with most children and musicians to Auschwitz, were Greta's sister was murdered. Greta was sent to Oederan where she was deployed in slave labour until the end of the war, when she was transferred to Terezín once again. In 1946 she left Europe from Prague to Palestine, where she enrolled in singing courses at the Palestine Conservatoire Jerusalem. Next to her day jobs - first as a nanny, later on with Kol Israel - , Greta as a member of professional choirs in Israel participated in many premieres (e.g. 'Kaddish' by Leonard Bernstein) and acted as soloist, like in 'David' by Darius Milhaud). She has made several CD-recordings and translated the libretto of 'Brundibár' into Hebrew. Greta Klingsberg is living in Jerusalem, (when not travelling around the world as a much sought-after contemporary witness). Lately she has appeared in two films: 'Mut zum Leben (D 2013, Dir.: Christa Spannbauer, Thomas Gonschior) and 'Wiedersehen mit Brundibár' (D 2014, Dir. Douglas Wolfsperger). October 1, 2015 she will be awarded the honorary membership of the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Exilforschung (Austrian Society for Exile Research). Update Primavera Driessen Gruber June 15, 2015
The Guardian (9 February 2015)
The children’s opera Brundibár is a fairytale with a fairly familiar message: good triumphs over evil. But place the work in the context of Theresienstadt, the Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia where it was performed between 1943 and 1944, and that message is thrown into much sharper relief. The resemblance to Hitler of Brundibár, the evil organ-grinder who claims the town square as his own, was obvious to adult audiences. But not, insists its lead singer, to its cast.
“The grownups interpreted it as this bad man who bullies everyone,” says Greta Klingsberg, who played lead character Aninka. “But the children never did. To us, Brundibár was the most popular character. He wore a moustache and, when he sang, it went up and down. We found him very funny.”
The opera, by the Jewish-Czech composer Hans Krása who was an inmate at Theresienstadt, tells the story of a brother and sister who try their hand at busking in the square, only to be chased away by the garishly dressed and talentless musician Brundibár (colloquial Czech for a bumblebee). So the siblings hatch a plot to turn him out. “At the end, when he’s thrown out, we welcomed him back on stage with open arms. He was one of us, our lovable Brundibár. It was not for us to see a political message.”
The opera provided a fantasy world for the children of Theresienstadt, even if the camp’s cultural life – due to the high number of prominent artists from central Europe imprisoned there – was cynically promoted by the Nazis for propaganda purposes.
“As a child, you identify with everything you do,” says Klingsberg, who was 13 at the time, with sole responsibility for her younger sister, her parents having escaped from Czechoslovakia to Palestine. “So when I was on stage, I had a school, a cat, and ice cream. All these things we hadn’t seen for years all of a sudden became quite real. It was wonderful. These were the moments of normal childhood for me, and for all of the children who participated in this opera. That’s why it was so special. In the camp, they stopped calling me Greta and called me Aninka.”
Having been chosen for the part because of her perfect pitch, and having already proved herself in other productions in the camp of Verdi’s Requiem, Smetana’s The Bartered Bride and Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Klingsberg performed it more than 50 times. There was a special show in 1944 for gullible representatives of the Red Cross who came to investigate the camp’s living conditions. Theresienstadt was turned into a “Potemkin village” for the visit, the most ailing prisoners having been deported to Auschwitz beforehand to reduce overcrowding. The Red Cross believed everything they were told and, on the back of their visit, a propaganda film was made called The Führer Gives the Jews a City, in which Klingsberg also featured – a tall pensive girl in a pinafore with a mane of dark hair, singing her heart out.
“I only found out I was in the film about 10 years ago,” says Klingsberg. A friend was visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust centre in Jerusalem, “and spotted the bit in which I appear. ‘How do you know it’s me?’ I asked. ‘Big eyes, big nose, now you just have a few more wrinkles,’ he replied. So I went to see it for myself and was really proud I hadn’t faked the singing for the camera.”
She remembers all the children being told to recite the line: “Uncle Rahm, sardines again?!” Rahm was their SS custodian. “I don’t know why – probably to show that we couldn’t have had it that bad if we were complaining about food.” The relish and speed with which the cast downed the sandwiches they had been given for the filming might have been comical were it not such a poignant reminder of how they were being starved. “We ate them so fast that they had to give us more, because they couldn’t film as fast as we ate. It was luxury – bread and margarine – out of the blue”.
Hope for more of the same kind of treatment was short-lived because, immediately after filming, all the cast and crew were loaded on to cattle trains and deported to Auschwitz. Most of the children, the musicians, the composer Krása and his director Kurt Gerron, were gassed. In the random selection process, Klingsberg was chosen for slave labour; her sister Trude, for death in the gas chambers, though she only discovered this much later. Klingsberg spent months in a series of camps before being returned to Theresienstadt, where she was liberated by the Soviet army in May 1945.
Klingsberg is now 85 and living in Jerusalem, where for years she enjoyed a successful operatic career. But Brundibár, she says, has never left her: she has translated the libretto into Hebrew, and is often called on to advise on productions around the world, most recently in Kosovo and Greece. “Once, years later, a woman came up to me when I was visiting Czechoslovakia and said, ‘I was in Theresienstadt with you. I was so happy once when you were sick and I was asked to sing your role. Thank you for that.’ We had a great laugh about it.”