Grandmother’s poems, penned in concentration camp, make beautiful music

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Lenka Lichtenberg was 10 years old when she learned she was Jewish. A child star of the musical theatre, she was on her way to sing at a Jewish community centre in Prague when her mother told her.

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“That’s awesome, I always wanted to be on the side of the underdog,” she replied, much to her mom’s dismay.

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Lichtenberg’s mother, Jana Renée Friesová, had been a year older when she found out she was Jewish, during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939. Friesová had been raised Catholic by secular Jewish parents, but that wasn’t enough to prevent the family from being deported to Terezín, a concentration camp north of Prague.

Friesová and her mother survived, but her father was sent to Auschwitz, where he was killed. After the war, Frisová went on to become a scholar, teaching philosophy and Jewish studies at a Prague university. In 1996, with the encouragement of her daughter and a friend, she published Fortress of My Youth: Memoir of a Terezín Survivor. It would be another 20 years before Lichtenberg learned intimate details of her grandmother’s experience in Terezín.

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When Friesová died in 2016, Lichtenberg travelled from her home in Toronto to Prague. She was going through her mother’s desk when she discovered a booklet of 65 poems written by her grandmother, Anna Hana Friesová, more than 70 years earlier, just before and during her time in Terezín.

She thought of donating the poems to a museum, but worried they would remain behind glass, “kind of dead, one of many artifacts,” Lichtenberg said in a recent interview. Being a musician, she decided instead to bring the poems to life.

“It was like a treasure given to me,” she recounted, “a gift from another world, from my grandmother. Being a musician, which I’ve been my whole life, the most obvious thing was to have these poems become songs.”

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The poems are not what one might expect.

“They are really unusual, considering where they were written,” Lichtenberg said. “Many of them are about love and loss of love, relationships, about loss of closeness and intimacy, which was clearly happening between her and her husband, Richard. You would never think they were written by a person who was literally on the brink of death, not knowing whether she would be transported (to Auschwitz) the next day.

“That she would be concerned with expressing herself about her relationship as opposed to the horrors around her — one could say it was a private world of escape where she could think about what was important to her personally, her marriage. Some of the poems are very sad. A half-dozen, which I believe were written toward the end of her stay, when she had lost all hope, go to truly dark places, describing a complete loss of faith. But most of them are beautiful love poems, and some are even quirky.”

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Lichtenberg released the album Thieves of Dreams last year — a selection of 16 of her grandmother’s poems, sung in the original Czech and set to a mellifluous cross-pollination of world music and jazz. It reached No. 36 on the World Music Charts Europe’s top albums of 2022.

Made with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, the album features contributions from several female composers, commissioned by Lichtenberg. The Quebec première of her performance Thieves of Dreams: Songs of Theresienstadt’s Secret Poetess takes place Saturday, Feb. 4 at 7:30 p.m. at Congregation Dorshei Emet in Hampstead.

Directed by Leah Cherniak, with visuals by Lumír Hladík, the multimedia performance has Lichtenberg flanked by an all-female band. They will be accompanied by projections of photo archives and historical footage, along with English translations of the lyrics, which Lichtenberg says are essential to understanding the material.

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The lyrics and album booklet are available to download for free on her website, but sadly not on streaming services, which provide only the music.

“It breaks my heart,” said Lichtenberg, who plans to release a second volume of the album with English versions of her grandmother’s poems.

The project is the fruition of a decades-spanning journey to connect with her Jewish identity for the artist, who moved to Vancouver in her early 20s, performing on cruise ships, singing in rock bands and lounge acts before settling in Toronto 30 years ago.

She earned a master’s degree in ethnomusicology from York University, and started working “as a serious Jewish musician,” performing traditional Jewish folk songs before writing her own music.

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Doing so “felt like an act of defiance,” Lichtenberg said. “Once I started singing Jewish music, I felt like I was reclaiming something lost.”

That quest has come full circle with Thieves of Dreams, which she hopes will contribute to a different understanding of the Holocaust.

“I really hope people listen with their hearts,” Lichtenberg said. “I’m all about beauty. Combined with the depth of what the experience was in which such beauty was created — that you can create beauty in those kinds of circumstances is astonishing. I think it’s uplifting to people to see that happened, and that it’s possible.”

AT A GLANCE

Lenka Lichtenberg performs Thieves of Dreams: Songs of Theresienstadt’s Secret Poetess, Saturday, Feb. 4 at 7:30 p.m. at Congregation Dorshei Emet, 18 Cleve Rd. in Hampstead, for Shabbat Shira. Tickets cost $36 in advance ($20 for students), $45 at the door, available at dorsheiemet.com. For more information on the project, see lenkalichtenberg.com.

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