Holocaust

In this issue, we have assembled four of our favorite writers, each taking his own perspective on the Holocaust. Tony Kushner’s wrenching short play But the Giraffe! was written as a curtain raiser for Hans Krása’s children’s opera Brundibár. Composed in the early years of World War II, Brundibár was smuggled by its conductor, Rudolph Freudenfeld, into the Terezin concentration camp where the opera was performed more than fifty times by the children of the camp. It is an inspiring story but also a complex one—as film of one of the performances was used by Nazi propagandists to show how happy Jews were in the camps. Kushner’s play confronts this hard reality, the double-edged sword of remembrance and forgetting. Brundibár is rescued from destruction, but its rescuers are not so fortunate.