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Sunday, Mar 1, 1992
Terezín Diary
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Seeing Through "Paradise": Artists and the Terezín Concentration Camp (see page 2). Admission is free with paid gallery admission. What Terezín was and wasn't-a ghetto and a prison, a place of art and a place of death-is a complex topic treated with insight and sensitivity in Terezín Diary. The film relates the story of Terezín through interviews with ten survivors who were among the 15,000 children at the camp (writer-producer Zuzana Justman was one). Images from the propaganda film, Hitler Gives the Jews a City, in which Terezín inmates were forced to participate, are placed in haunting juxtaposition to voice-over descriptions of the reality of Terezín. The centerpiece of the film is an interview with Helga Kinsky, whose vivid childhood diaries, along with those of her father, describe the paradoxes of this camp in which children saw "a piano concerto on a rooftop one night and a transport to death the next day." The interviewees offer insights into the vast hypocrisy of the Nazi aesthetic, with its complex relationship between art and death.
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