Lenka Lichtenberg on setting her grandmother’s Terezín poetry to music
Lenka Lichtenberg is a Prague-born singer and composer living in Toronto. She has recently won the Juno Award, Canada’s highest music prize, for Thieves of Dreams, an album based on poetry written by her grandmother in Terezín during the Holocaust which she discovered in 2017 after her mother passed away. This past Sunday, Lichtenberg performed the songs to Czech audiences for the first time at a concert at the Maisel Synagogue in Prague. I met with her ahead of the show to discuss the album and I started by asking her if she had any previous knowledge of the poems before discovering them in her mother’s belongings:
“I have a fleeting memory of my mom once mentioning that there were some poems, but I've never seen them and she never tried to present them to me or present them to anybody.
“So when I found them, it really was a new thing. It actually didn't even occur to me that this is what she meant, you because it was decades ago when she mentioned that.
“I have a theory why she never tried to show this to the world, and that is that their relationship wasn’t really that great. And maybe she didn't think that they were good, or maybe they were good and she didn't want to acknowledge it.
“Who knows? It could be either of the two or some other reason that I don't know, and we'll never find out. So it was all pretty well a massive surprise to me.”
Did you immediately know that you wanted to make them public? That you want to make your grandmother's voice heard?
“Not immediately. At first I was just listening and getting swept by the strength of the words. There are 65 of the poems, and of those I would say a good 80 percent are really beautiful in my own eyes.
“So I was just reading and thinking: Oh my goodness, this is really beautiful. But is it just me? Maybe I'm biased because it is my grandmother.
“So overtime I let a few other Czech people that I trust read some of these and everybody was just going: Holy cow, this is beautiful.
“And then I started to think about what to do with this and so I thought: maybe this needs to go to the Yad Vashem or one of those Holocaust museums. But I couldn't really decide.
“And about a year later I thought, no, if I do that, then they will be sitting somewhere behind glass, nobody will really read them and they would be lost for the second time. What’s the point of that?
“The next step was to figure out what to do with it if I want them to stay alive. And being a musician, the natural step for me was to think in terms of music.
“How can I present it in a way that is natural to me as a musician? So that was the decision, but it took me a while to get to this.”
Can you tell us a little bit more about your grandmother? How did she end up in Terezín? When was the family sent to the ghetto?
“My grandma and her husband Richard and my mother, Jana Renée Friesová, were deported to Terezín on December 23, just the day before Christmas. Here, 1942.
“They left from their house in Josefov and then they had to go to a gathering place in Hradec Králové and from there they will put on with hundreds of others on a transport to Terezín. So that's when they left.
Why do you think your grandmother wrote these poems? What did it mean to her writing these poems? Do you think it was a way for her to escape into another reality, at least for a while?
“I think that's exactly it. Also, she really liked literature. The way I remember her from my childhood was that we were always in a library.
“She would be taking me to the library every day to get some books for herself, and she was always reading, and I think that was a lifelong passion. So a knowledge of literature and of poetry was very deep for her.
“I don't know if and what she wrote before the Holocaust, but I suspect she used writing as a way to create her own little world where she actually was in control and where she was safe.
“Because you never knew what was coming the next day. They were in great danger all the time really. So this was, I think, a form of an escape, apart from the fact that she clearly loved expressing herself that way.
“And there is quite a range of emotions that she presents in her poems. There are many in the beginning, the first good third of them I would say, that are still kind of light.
“Interestingly enough, a lot of the poems are about the relationship with her husband, so she still had space to think about a marriage and about relationships and about romantic stuff.
“But at some point, she actually lost her hope and faith, but it's only in a few of her works that this comes through, but when it gets dark, it is very dark.”
But as far as I can say from what I have read, hope is the prevailing feeling that I have from those texts.
“There's a lot of mention of God and I have never heard her talking about God. So she did have faith and then she lost it.”
“Yes, that’s right. And that is really quite amazing. I don't know where that came from in her. I think she was a really extremely resilient.
“Interestingly also there's a lot of mention of God and I have never heard her talking about God. Maybe she lost her faith after that, but God has definitely mentioned at least 15 or 20 times in various places.
“So she did have faith and then she lost it. But I think the loss only happened towards the end of her writing the poems or towards the end of being there.
“I don't know, because they're not dated. There's only one poem that is dated and or not even precisely. It just says: Terezín, 1943.”
One of the darkest songs is called I Want to Curse You Bitter World, yes. Can you tell us a little bit more about it?
“I think that song is mainly about betrayal. So when she says, I wanted to curse you, Bitter Land, because you dealt so strangely with my faith in my hopes because you lied, she is talking to the country that she loved and that her family loved and that allowed this to happen.
“But what make this song fascinating is the end, where she actually makes this really wonderful twist and says: I wanted to curse you but I didn't. Instead I am praying and I feel softer again and it's because the trees around me are in bloom.
“To me, this is a very interesting journey from being so betrayed and bitter and then suddenly talking about blooming trees and not feeling bitter.”
There is also one where she talks about the parting with her.
“Yes, that one is so dreadful….”
Do you know when they saw each other for the last time?
“Yes, I actually know quite a lot about the last night that my grandmother was with her husband as he was about to be transported to Auschwitz, never to be seen again, because my mom describes the particular night in her book.
“So I know that grandma spent the whole night sitting on the mattress in the barracks where all the men were waiting and saying goodbye to everybody and it must have been very traumatic.
“I think the description that we have in the poem, that she says the last goodbye, that it really is the last goodbye. And I know about it? Because by mom describes how her mom was with her dad, while my mom’s first love also took place in Terezín, and her boyfriend was also leaving.
“So she was also in that same building and she describes how she was so torn whether she should be with her dad or whether she should be with her boyfriend.
“So she was running from one man to another and feeling guilty about either choice. And then she said goodbye to both of them and her dad never came back. But her boyfriend actually did.”
One more song that I would like to talk about is the final one. I Have My Own Grief because it includes a recording of your own mother's voice. Why have you decided to incorporate that recording into the song?
“Because, as I mentioned, their relationship was not perfect and this was a way to bring them together. I could bring together my grandmother’s poem, my mother's voice, reading from her diary, and my own music and my singing.
“Suddenly the three of us, the three generations, are in one place at the same time, which is remarkable to me. So that was special to me.
“Also I am using my mom's voice and you can hear that her voice is breaking as she's telling the story of locking the door for the last time and handing over the key to the Nazi officer for the last time.
“As she's describing this she's taking a deep breath between each word and it is clearly a super emotional moment for her and I think that's the core of the song.
“So I wrote everything else around that particular element, which is her voice and her description of those moments and her voice breaking. I thought that was just so unique that I actually have access to that particular clip.”
So how important was this whole process of creating this particular album in sort of learning new things about your grandmother? Because I imagine your own childhood memories of your grandmother must be quite different. So what have you learned about all the women in your family throughout this process?
“Her poetry really showed me an entirely different side that I would have not ever known had it not been for the poems.”
“What I have learned is actually the whole point of my play about her, which is that I didn't know her at all. That's my last sentence in the play.
“After all these years, I realized that the woman I thought was my grandmother was someone else, and in fact I didn't know her at all. And that is the truth.
“Because the way I knew her as a child, she was very light hearted, very fun, very sociable, endearing, running around, playing tennis, smoking all the time. She had none of that depth and melancholia. It was just never there.
“So you'd never guess that she also had that side to her. So her poetry really showed an entirely different side that I would have not ever known had it not been for the poems.”
We are actually talking just a few hours before the Prague concert, which is the first time you are going to present this album to Czech audiences. How important is it for you to present it in the country where your grandmother was born and where you were born?
“It is extremely important because this is the first time I will be singing these songs and saying the poems to people who understand them.
“Normally how it works is that we have projections, we have a screen with all the translations on them, so people do understand what I'm singing, but the songs are in Czech, so unless they are reading, they have no idea what I'm actually saying.
“Here everybody will understand every word and it's a totally different feeling, when you know that each word is being understood. So that's very exciting to me for that reason as a performer.
“What's a point of personal importance is that of course it's a circle to me. It's a circle because I come from here and the family was here and so on. And the poems were written in Czechoslovakia. So coming back here now, at this point of my life, is very emotional for me.”
