Afbeelding uit de Groag-collection. (Beit Theresienstadt)
Norman Lebrecht, Tales of the recording angel:
“She has just released an album of songs from the Terezin concentration camp, both the formal Lieder that were put on to fool Red Cross visitors, and the consoling lullabies that a nurse, Ilse Weber, wrote for the children she sang to sleep until she and they were shipped to Auschwitz. Although raised among Swedish nobility on the diplomatic circuit and feted these days from Salzburg to Gstaad, Anne-Sofie von Otter is rooted in the chronicle of genocide, and all because of a man called Gerstein.
Her tragic tale begins on a train, as so many war stories do. Anne-Sofie’s father, Baron Göran von Otter, was a Swedish diplomat in wartime Germany, adjutant to the ambassador. On the night of 20-21 August 1942, travelling from Warsaw to Berlin, he became an involuntary witness to the Holocaust.
Standing in the corridor because he could not get a sleeper, the diplomat saw an SS officer glancing in his direction. When the train stopped at a station, both men got off for fresh air. On the pitch-dark platform, the SS man asked for a light for his cigarette. Von Otter produced a pack of matches with a Swedish crest. ‘I must talk to you,’ said Kurt Gerstein.”
Opnames zijn op website van Von Otter te beluisteren.
