About This Classical Music Drama for the Concert Stage

Three young adults face the trials and horrors of life in Warsaw, Poland, between 1939 and 1943. Rachael and her brother, Aaron, have to decide whether to stay with the family or run for freedom. 

Rachael and her boyfriend, Joshua, discover both the passion and the security of romantic love just as the entire vibrant, rich, and learned Jewish community of Warsaw—more than 350,000 people representing thirty percent of the population of the city—were dehumanized and then squeezed mercilessly into a walled off ghetto, 2.4 percent of the city. The choices they make, the deep love they experience and declare, and the futures that they dream of are interwoven with the potent and horrifying terror of the Nazi movement and the heroics of their resistance to it.

Their heart-rending journey into the hell of Auschwitz, as nearly the entire Jewish population of Europe is murdered into virtual extinction, is recounted to young Rachel by her grandmother, Batchya, on the life affirming day of Rachel’s Bat Mitzvah, reminding us all that prejudice, intolerance, and ignorance stoked by self-aggrandizing evil remains a constant threat to all that is good, just, and right in our shared humanity.

As in classical Greek Tragedy, the chorus plays multiple roles, ranging from Jews in the ghetto to the Nazis that taunt them daily. The three youths are hunted, discovered, separated, and ghetto-bound. Aaron tries to escape the hell Europe has become but ends up fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising before escaping Warsaw and joining the Polish resistance, desperately trying to save his sister by assisting the Russians in liberating Auschwitz. Independently, the lovers get shipped to the camps, to the ongoing rhythm of the trains that represent their final journey and the “final solution.” All they hoped for—their simple, lovely plans for family, career, and noble vocations—is declared and celebrated, fought for, and then finally mourned.

The loss of the Six Million is deeply felt through what these three lovely people might have become; what we all might have become were it not for the Holocaust, what humanity could and still should become were it not for the continued holocausts that plague our world. The simple words of the Mourner’s Kaddish, combined with a new chorale setting of the text, compel us to pray and to fight for peace in the world, and never to forget, lest this continue to happen again and again. Just as poignantly, Remember Warsaw reminds us that the most important thing in this life is to be kind.

Goodness grows in kindness.