Simon Broughton and Geraldine Auerbach

Discovering and Presenting the Music of Terezin on stage and TV

Simon Broughton has made BBC radio and TV documentaries featuring music in extreme circumstances. In 1985 he made a radio programme about the extraordinary artistic flowering, against all odds, in the Concentration Camp of Theresienstadt (Terezín) in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. He followed this in 1993 with a ground-breaking BBC2 television documentary The Music of Terezín about the composers who were later murdered in Auschwitz. It includes interviews with survivors and performances filmed in Terezín itself. In 2010, with the renowned Nash Ensemble, Simon organised a weekend of Terezín music at Wigmore Hall which  also travelled to New York and Prague. Simon is also involved in the BBC’s Total Immersion: Music for the End of Time at the Barbican on January 23rd  2022 featuring music by composers imprisoned by the Nazis. Read Simon on Music in Terezin BBC Music Magazine.  Simon also made a television film for BBC2 about klezmer music in 1992 called Fiddler on the Hoof.

Geraldine Auerbach MBE
From 1983, Geraldine began discovering and celebrating Jewish music. From 1984 to 2000 she ran a pioneering, biennial, month-long, Jewish Music Festival. In the 1986 festival she presented a day of Music in Terezin in Canterbury for which she invited two musicians who had not met since their incarceration. She was pleased to invite Simon Broughton to talk and show his films in various festivals. In 2000 the Jewish Music Institute with its lectureship in Jewish music moved to SOAS from where it ran International Conferences special concerts and summer schools in different aspects of Jewish music such as Yiddish culture, Synagogue Music, Israeli Music and Music Suppressed by the Third Reich. For more about Geraldine and the Jewish Music Institute, see JMI Newsletter Autumn 2010