By James Conlon

“Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate…Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?” - Siegfried Sassoon

After 1945, those who performed, wrote or taught classical music worked in a culture scarred by omissions. These were not of their making, but were part of the legacy of atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. With its racist ideology and systematic suppression particularly, although not exclusively, of Jewish musicians, artists and writers, the Third Reich silenced two generations of composers and, with them, an entire musical heritage. Many, who perished in concentration camps, and others, whose freedom and productivity were curtailed, were fated to be forgotten after the war. Their music seemed to have passed with them, lost in endless silence.

By Bret Werb

In the spring and summer of 1943, a theater piece with a stellar cast and an urgent message scooped the daily press to bring news of the genocide of European Jews to a scarcely believing American public. Subtitled “A memorial dedicated to the 2,000,000 Jewish dead of Europe,” We Will Never Die was the brainchild of the popular screenwriter Ben Hecht (1894–1964). Those unfamiliar with Hecht's name will probably recognize the titles of some of the more than 150 films to which he contributed: Scarface, Twentieth Century, Gone With the Wind, Notorious, A Star Is Born. An ex-newsman who had lived the fabulous-gaudy life that a Chicago newsman of the nineteen-teens and the roaring teens and '20s was supposed to have lived, Hecht had an insider's grasp of the popular media and the confidence and enterprise to challenge its priorities openly.