Facing the music of the Holocaust in Turkey
Turkey has long claimed that it has saved many Jews twice in history, but how true is that?
Renan Koen first sat at a piano in Theresienstadt in 2018. For seven years prior, she played compositions written by internees at the hybrid concentration camp and ghetto near Terezin, the Czech fortress town that was occupied by Germans in World War II.
After 2018, she began making annual pilgrimages from Istanbul to this ghostly Czech town to hear its trees whisper between silences before performing lecture concerts from her 2015 album “Holocaust Remembrance / Before Sleep.”
“I really understood better, more deeply,” said Koen, an award-winning classical pianist and music therapist from Istanbul who started to honor her Jewish heritage with her 2014 album of Ladino songs, “Lost Traces, Hidden Memories.”
She advocates for Holocaust awareness in Turkey and beyond by performing the works of Jewish composers Gideon Klein, Viktor Ullman, Zikmund Schul and Pavel Haas, none of whom survived Nazi rule. "I understood the tempos more, the pace of life, where they walked.”
