Lechaïm To Live

In the early 1940’s, during the period of the Nazi extermination of the masses, millions of human beings were deported to extermination camps. There were members of the Jewish people, Romanies, the Gravely ill, Handicapped, those who opposed the Nazi regime and homosexuals.

The great military conflict and genocide had not long ended when two children from the Varsavia ghetto, concentration camp survivors, are playing in an attic filled with memories of their murdered parents.
Here the children develop the memories of their parents, revisiting the phases of their lives up until the last sad days of their parents’ demise. They do this by dressing up as clowns. The clown as a paradoxical being, mad, who expresses human madness with its own mask and body, the human madness that has manifested itself in this great tragedy. With the pure, instinctive emotions of a DE’humanised’ being: expressing pain, fear, anger, joy, happiness, melancholy and sadness.
Why the Klezmer music? The repertoire of Klezmer music from the beginning of AD 900 expresses melodies of the lives of the small farming communities that accompanied them; weddings, funerals, births – an extraordinary repertoire that evokes the real sense of life and community. The source of inspiration was Victor E Franlkl’s opera and in particular the book, ‘A Psychologist in the Concentration Camps’ – ‘’how to give life sense again’’.