Professor Jean-Jacques Van Vlasselaer, Waterloo University
“About Culture, Creativity, and Courage in the Concentration Camps”
Reflections on what culture and creative means in the context of the concentration camps; their relationship to memory, history, reality and works of art. Examples from the extra-ordinary 36 months’ existence of the Terezin Durchgangslager and its Freizeitgestaltung: the lectures, the library, the theatre and music performances, writing and compositing on the edge of the abyss. The appropriation of German culture, and an opera about war and dictatorship functioning as a memory-buoy and warning to future generations.