Terezín Sings
Welcome to our website for Signs of Life, a musical drama about a young girl sent to the Czech ghetto Terezín (also known as Theresienstadt). We—Peter Ullian (bookwriter), Len Schiff (lyricist), and Joel Derfner (composer)—are very happy that Amas Musical Theatre, a not-for-profit champion of new work, hopes to produce our show in New York in February of 2010.
As time passes, fewer and fewer people remember the Holocaust. Each of us writers has survivors in the family, and we believe fervently that the Shoah must never be forgotten. So we've set up this website, hoping that if you find out more about our show we'll be able to bring an important piece of Jewish history to life.
Signs of Life is about Lorelei, a young Jewish painter living in Prague in the 1940s; at the start of the show, she’s sent to the ghetto of Terezín, renamed Theresienstadt by the Nazis and filled with the most talented Jewish artists, musicians, and intellectuals in Europe. Lorelei is forced to work in the propaganda office, painting beautiful scenes of life in the ghetto in preparation for the upcoming Red Cross visit. When she realizes that Theresienstadt is nothing but a waystation for Auschwitz, however, she begins sketching the real camp in secret: the starvation, the overcrowding, the disease. When the Red Cross inspector is completely duped by the sham the Nazis present, Lorelei understands that neither she nor her friends and family are likely to survive the war, so they hide the sketches away throughout the ghetto in hopes that the truth will survive after they are gone. The Nazis discover their deception, however, and Lorelei and her loved ones face the probability that, when they are gone, no trace of them will remain. Their response—like the response of the real inmates of Terezín, upon whom these characters and this story are based—shows us what it means to speak truth to power, to assert your freedom when you are not free, and to insist that the will to destroy will always be vanquished by the power to create.
Hear Music From the Show