The Mozart Question

Resource Pack

The Mozart Question

Sunday 5 December 2010 Royal Festival Hall

Vladimir Jurowski conductor Daniel Pioro violin Michael Morpurgo narrator Alison Reid narrator Simon Reade director

Contents2

3

4-9

10-12

13-17

18-20

21-23

24

Introduction

Themes and Discussion Points

The Effects and Legacy of the Holocaust

The History of the Holocaust

How were Musicians and Artists Treated Differently?

Glossary

Michael Morpurgo

Introduction3

The Mozart Question is the story of the violinist Paulo Levi. As he is interviewed by a journalist at his home in Venice, we hear about how he developed a passion for music as a child. We then learn how, with the help of his teacher Benjamin, he goes on to become a great performer. However, running parallel to this story, is also that of his parents. Both musicians too, we find out about a dark and challenging part of their lives - one that had a lasting effect on them.

Friendship and family, truth and secrets, and the power of culture and music are all interwoven in the book, but these themes are given added potency by how they emerge out of the one question that Paolo has always refused to answer, ‘The Mozart Question’. The historical origins of this question can be traced to the traumatic and disturbing events of the Holocaust, and in order to appreciate the issues raised and addressed in the book it is helpful to have an understanding of this history. The information that follows will help you start to think about some of the themes of the story, and give you a feel for the historical period in which it is set.

Please note – the specific events of the Holocaust were among the most disturbing and horrific to occur in human history, and continue to pose questions crucial to the world we live in today. Because of the extreme nature of these events, caution must be exercised when approaching this history – particularly with children of a young age. It is therefore strongly advised that parental discretion is used in deciding how much of the historical detail provided below is shared with young children.

Themes and Discussion Points4

The Holocaust and the issues it raises are not easy to grapple with – especially for young children. A helpful approach can be to focus on some of the themes in The Mozart Question and use these to introduce children to aspects of the Holocaust. The following are suggested themes you might focus on. Each section is followed by some questions that you may wish to use.

Illustration © 2007 Michael ForemanFrom THE MOZART QUESTION by Michael Morpurgo & illustrated by Michael ForemanReproduced by permission of Walker Books Ltd, London SE11 5HJ – www.walker.co.uk


Hope, belief, humanity...

‘It is a wonderful world out there. There are times when it can be hard to go on believing that. But always believe it, Paolo, because it is true.’

The Holocaust involved the persecution and murder of around six million Jewish men, women and children at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. In many cases, the victims were stripped of their individual identities, dehumanised and subjected to all manner of humiliations. Seen from this perspective it might seem strange to think that someone like Benjamin would tell Paolo that the world is a wonderful place, but the stories of survivors can provide us with insights and inspiration. Although Benjamin and Paolo’s parents are fictional characters they are based on the experiences of real individuals, and the fact that some survived the Holocaust is just one reason why it remains important.

Who were the victims of the Holocaust?

Why are Holocaust survivors important people?

Does it matter that Paolo’s parents are fictional characters?


Truth, secrets, remembering...

‘I will tell you a story...after it is over you will need ask me no more questions. Someone once told me that all secrets are lies. The time has come, I think, not to lie anymore.’

Paolo’s story is powerful for a number of reasons. Firstly, because Paolo has never spoken about it before, a great deal of mystery has built up around ‘The Mozart Question’. Secondly, the reason that Paolo has not spoken of these things before – because he promised not to play Mozart while his father was alive – is very moving and shows the love that can exist between a parent and a child. Finally, there are the remarkable experiences of his parents and Benjamin’s survival against all odds, and the relevance that these continue to have. What motivates Paolo to share his story is his wish to tell the truth; something which should also motivate us to continue to think and learn about the Holocaust. This is especially so given that the Nazis intended that the Holocaust should be a secret and never be remembered.

Why is telling the truth important?

What reasons might the Nazis have had for wanting the Holocaust to remain a secret?

How should we remember the Holocaust today?


Family, separation, human beings...

‘They did not know when they stepped forward that they would at once be separated from their families, would have to watch them being herded off towards those hellish chimneys, never to be seen again.’

At the centre of Paolo’s story is his family, and we are given lots of examples of the ups and downs they shared. These aspects of family life are something which many of us can relate to, but they are also things which the victims of the Holocaust would have experienced as well. Whilst we cannot imagine how it felt to have been separated from our families in the way that the victims were, remembering that each person who died in the Holocaust had parents, grandparents, siblings and so forth helps to restore the humanity which was systematically taken from them. It also highlights that although these individuals and their families may have lived in a different time, a different space and had different beliefs, they were not fundamentally that different from you or me.

Why is it upsetting to be separated from our families and loved ones?

What similarities do we have with the victims of the Holocaust?

Why is it crucial for us to remember the victims as human beings?

Illustration © 2007 Michael ForemanFrom THE MOZART QUESTION by Michael Morpurgo & illustrated by Michael ForemanReproduced by permission of Walker Books Ltd, London SE11 5HJ – www.walker.co.uk


Scale, scope, relevance...

‘The three of them were brought by train to the concentration camp from all over Europe...all Jewish, and all bound for the gas chamber and extermination like so many millions.’

Through the characters in The Mozart Question we come across a variety of different countries, from the West to the East of Europe. Together with the journalist we learn that Paolo’s parents were originally from Warsaw and Venice, and Benjamin from Paris. This geographical spread and the circumstances under which they were brought together remind us that the Holocaust was not an event that occurred in a faraway place, but instead touched many countries and many people across the continent. Such widespread involvement teaches us that the Holocaust was not something that ‘the Germans’ did to ‘the Jews’ in some faraway place; it was rather a European event which presents challenges to all of us regardless of our nationality or religion.

How many different countries are referred to or mentioned in the story?

What is the significance of people from different countries being involved in the Holocaust? What does this tell us?

The Holocaust ended over 65 years ago – why is it still relevant to us today?


Dehumanisation, surviving, resisting...

‘Every performance was your best performance, not to please them, but to show them what you could do, to prove to them how good you were despite all they were doing to humiliate you, to destroy you in body and soul.’

The process of dehumanisation was an essential part of the Holocaust for the Nazis. For some, the removal of the Jews’ humanity made it easier to justify the measures that were taken against them – even when this included murder. At the same time, stripping people of their individuality, removing their identities, taking away their rights and freedoms and treating them in inhumane ways were also actions intended to break the victims’ spirits and prevent them from resisting. In many instances these aims were achieved, but remarkably a lot of people did not give up hope, they pulled together with people they might not have known and opposed the Nazis in different ways. The story of Benjamin and Paolo’s parents and their survival is a brilliant example of this.

Why is it important to remember that we are all human beings?

How did people like Paolo’s parents and Benjamin survive the Holocaust?

What should we learn from Holocaust survivors?

Kurt Weill was a famous German-Jewish composer who fled from Nazi Germany in the early 1930s. In 1943 he wrote the score for a production called We Will Never Die staged in New York, intended to highlight what the Nazis were doing to Jews. Over 40,000 people attended two performances in Madison Square Garden, and brought much needed awareness of the suffering of the Jews in Europe.

The Effects and Legacy of the Holocaust10

The unconditional surrender of Germany on 8 May 1945 formally marked the end of both the war and the Holocaust, although many survivors had been freed by Allied soldiers before this date. This liberation from Nazi tyranny was of course celebrated by survivors, but it didn’t necessarily mark an end of suffering and trauma.

For some months after liberation survivors were kept in medical institutions or moved to former camps which had now become gathering points for ‘displaced persons’. Although no longer prisoners, conditions were still difficult and survivors were forced to come to terms with the reality that many of their families and friends had been killed. For those who managed to return to their former homes they found much had changed beyond recognition. Others, wanting to emigrate to Palestine or other countries were frustrated by rules and restrictions which delayed or prevented them from moving. Even those who were able to find loved ones or new homes found that the majority of non-Jews they came into contact with had little or no wish to hear about the horrors the survivors had experienced, or if they did, couldn’t believe what they were being told.

The idea of returning to a ‘normal’ life was full of all manner of challenges, and the number of survivors struggled for some time to come to terms with their experiences. The traumas of persecution, dehumanisation and witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust left deep psychological and emotional scars on many – with some never fully recovering from them. The widespread indifference of non-Jews to the events was made even harder by large numbers of perpetrators escaping justice and a frequent inability to find the right words or phrases to express wtheat survivors had been through.

For some survivors, using different art forms became a crucial means to expressing thoughts and feelings. In this way, many of the compositions and adaptations created during the Holocaust in camps and ghettos continued to be performed – partly out of respect for those who

The French composer, organist and pianist, Olivier Messiaen wrote his piece Quatuor pour la fin du temps whilst in a German prisoner of war camp. Captured whilst serving in the medical corp of the French army, Messiaen soon discovered that he had been imprisoned with a violinist, clarinettist and cellist. Messiaen himself played piano at its first performance inside the camp in 1941.


perished and to remember the events – and new musical creations also appeared. The first of these were created in the Displaced Persons camps at the end of the war, where survivors tried to come to terms with their experiences and loss. Increasingly music became one of a variety of artistic mediums through which both those involved and those removed from the Holocaust tried to respond to its occurrence.

For others like Paolo’s father however, art was corrupted by their experiences of the Holocaust. A famous philosopher named Theodor Adorno once remarked that to create art after Auschwitz was ‘barbaric’, and, although he later revised this position, many people seized upon his idea. According to this thinking, since the Nazis had used and exploited art in all its forms to promote their ideology and beliefs, it was no longer appropriate or possible to make art for art’s sake. Equally it was said that no poem, painting or song could ever really represent the horrors of the Holocaust, and that no one could really understand what happened in the camps unless they were actually there. Because of this it was said that it was better not to try and do so.

Yet such beliefs did not prevent an increasing number of artists, writers and performers engaging with the Holocaust during the post-war period. At first this development was slow, and it was only in the 1970s that the Holocaust really began to be an object of interest in Western society. Today, the Holocaust has a presence in many countries’ cultures around the world.

A cellist, Anita Lasker Wallfisch was born in Breslau in modern day Poland, into an assimilated Jewish family. In 1942, when she was just 16 both of Anita’s parents were deported to Lublin and were never seen again. Soon after Anita became involved in the resistance, providing French prisoners of war with forged passports so they could escape. One day Anita herself planned to flee Poland, but she was being watched by the Gestapo and was arrested at the train station. After being kept in prison for a year, Anita was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Crucially she was sent not as a Jew but as a criminal, and so avoided being sent to the gas chambers. Anita survived in Auschwitz-Birkenau for nearly a year by becoming a member of the camp orchestra, before then being sent on to another camp. She had to perform with other musicians every morning and every evening at the camp entrance so that the work units leaving and returning marched in time, and also had to be on-call to play for SS officers privately. Anita survived the Holocaust and settled in Britain. She now lives in London.


The effects of the Holocaust have, therefore, been wide and varied. For survivors, liberation did not necessarily bring about closure with many finding difficulty in adjusting. In time, a large number of survivors were able to rebuild their lives, go on to make important and positive contributions to the country they chose to live in, and become indispensible to increasing awareness of the Holocaust and preserving its memory. For the rest of the world who did not experience the events first-hand, the Holocaust has become a major historical event which can reveal much about the past, present and future.

History of the Holocaust13

Foundations

The Holocaust can be defined as the persecution and extermination of around six million Jewish men, women and children. It was not an inevitable occurrence but it did draw on short and longer-term trends in history. Anti-Jewish prejudice had a long history in Europe, but the rise of science in the 18th and 19th centuries saw hostile perceptions about the Jews no longer based just on religion. Instead, new scientific thinking and findings were manipulated to justify hatred of Jews, with the ideas of humans belonging to different races of differing values fighting for survival now used for old prejudices. After the upheaval and bloodshed of World War One, such irrational thoughts became more intense and popular – particularly, but not exclusively, in Germany.

Persecution

The Nazis made no secret of their antisemitic views, but it would be wrong to claim that they came to power in Germany because of them. There were a number of reasons why Hitler was invited to become Chancellor in January 1933, but once in power their anti-Jewish ideas soon became policy. A boycott of Jewish shops was organised in April 1933, while various laws were passed that removed Jews from public life in Germany. In September 1935 at an annual rally in Nuremberg new laws were announced which marked a turning point in the Nazis’ policies. Jews were now prohibited from marrying or having relations with ‘non-Jews’, and were no longer considered to be citizens of Germany, whilst propaganda depicting them as inhuman and enemies of the nation continued to be produced. The next turning point came in November 1938, when a number of riots targeting Jews occurred across the country with the Government’s assent. Shops were looted, synagogues were burnt and Jews were attacked and arrested in what became known as Kristallnacht – Night of Broken Glass. The strength of Nazi antisemitism was now clear for all to see. The main aim of the Nazis, at this point, was to make Germany ‘Judenfrei’ – free of Jews, ideally by them emigrating to other countries.

Brundibar was an opera written for children by Hans Krasa in 1938. In the opera two children stand up against an evil organ-grinder who bullies them. The story was an allegory with the organ-grinder representing Hitler. Remarkably, the opera was performed over fifty times in Theresienstadt.


Ghettos

After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the Nazis tried to find a ‘territorial solution’ to what they saw as the ‘Jewish Question’. While part of Poland would be incorporated into Germany, another area would be used as a dumping ground for hundreds of thousands of Jews. Before being moved to the edges of the Nazi empire it was decided to cram large numbers of Jews together in towns and cities. As various plans came to nothing, these areas were sealed off from the non-Jewish population and the conditions within the ‘ghettos’ became deadly due to starvation, disease and overcrowding.

Euthanasia, Russia and the Final Solution

The outbreak of war in 1939 brought changes to the way that the Nazis behaved towards many groups that they considered inferior and their enemies. One such group was mentally and physically disabled men, women and children who were considered an economic burden on Germany and threatened the purity of the German race. Once war began, these individuals began to be killed by doctors and nurses in institutions across the country, at first by lethal injection or starvation but then by carbon monoxide gas. The Nazis called this the ‘Euthanasia Programme’, and it was officially ended in August 1941. Shortly before, in June, Germany had invaded Soviet Russia in one of the major turning points of World War Two and the Holocaust. The war with Russia was an ideological one which was fought without rules. As the German army advanced, mobile killing squads called Einsatzgruppen worked behind the frontline rounding up Soviet officers and Jews and then shooting them. The Nazis believed that war with Soviet Russia would be over quickly, and that the territory could then be used to house the thousands of Jews now under German control. This didn’t happen however, and sometime in the autumn/winter of 1941 it was decided that a new policy of mass murder would be followed: what the Nazis called, the ‘Final Solution’ of the ‘Jewish Question’. Construction work began on the Nazis’ most sinister and unique invention: the death camps.


The Camp System

In Nazi occupied Europe there were a variety of different camps, but the death camps existed only to kill people. There were four death camps in Poland – Chelmno, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. The methods used in each camp were more or less the same. Jews would arrive at the camps in cattle trucks, having travelled for days without food, water or sanitation. On arrival men would be separated from woman and children, be told they had to hand over all their possessions and instructed to take a shower for disinfection purposes. They would then be moved into airtight rooms where poison gas was released. Special teams of Jews would then clear the gas chambers and take the corpses to pits where they were buried or burnt. The death camps opened in 1942 and because of their nature, few who were sent there ever survived. Before they began their work, a group of Nazi officials met together at what was known as the Wannsee Conference, where the decision to kill all the Jews of Europe was announced and discussed. Gassings also took place in two other places – Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp orchestra play for work groups as they leave and enter the camp Reproduced with kind permission of Yad Vashem Reference & Information Services


A more familiar type of camp was the concentration camp. People were imprisoned in these camps for all manner of reasons, and the first of these had appeared in Germany in the 1930s. During the war these spread all over Europe and the prisoners within them became a source of slave labour. Daily life was built around routine, with prisoners having to get up early for a roll-call before spending the day undertaking different forms of work. This could vary from work related to the running of the camp – such as cooking, cleaning and so on – to working in a factory or doing heavy manual labour. Those leaving to work outside the camp would often pass a group of musicians on their way out and on their return; not for entertainment, but to ensure that the prisoners marched in time. Starvation and malnourishment were rife since food rations were so inadequate and prisoners would receive beatings and punishments at the whim of the guards. Sanitation and heating facilities were virtually non-existent, and prisoners slept in wooden bunks with at least two or three others. To survive prisoners needed cunning, mental strength, and no small amount of luck.

The end of the war

As defeat became increasingly likely, the Nazis went to great lengths to disguise their crimes. All evidence of the death camps in Poland – Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Chelmno – was erased; facilities were dismantled, pits were filled in, and trees were planted. After the Soviet Red Army captured Majdanek almost intact in July 1944, the Nazis began to demolish the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. However, when the camp was liberated in January 1945, the ruins could still be seen.

Before these camps were abandoned or captured, all prisoners who could still walk were forced to march back towards Germany. Many prisoners died on these ‘death marches’, either from the cold, starvation, or were shot by their captors. Those who survived were taken to concentration camps rife with disease and overcrowding.

It is impossible to know for sure the exact number of people who perished in the Holocaust, but the figure most historians agree on is six million. This equated to two out of every three Jews living in Europe in 1939, with at least one million children murdered. In addition to these


victims, around 200,000 Roma (gypsies) and at least 200,000 mentally or physically disabled men, women and children were also killed, while some three million Soviet prisoners of war died in Nazi captivity.

Viktor Ullman was an Austrian-Jew and acclaimed conductor and composer, who was trapped in Prague when the Nazis invaded in 1939. Although he had managed to send two of his youngest children on one of the last Kindertransports to the United Kingdom, Viktor could not find refuge for himself and so became vulnerable for deportation. In 1942 he was sent to Theresienstadt, but fortunately rather than being assigned to hard labour Viktor was instead drafted by the authorities into the ‘Administration of Leisure Activities’. Viktor had an important role in organising musical productions, but he also continued to be a prolific writer, performer and composer himself. In one of his final written reflections Viktor stated ‘in my musical work at Theresienstadt, I have bloomed in musical growth and not felt myself at all inhibited: we simply did not sit and lament on the shores of the rivers of Babylon that our will for culture was not sufficient to our will to exist.’ On 16 October 1944 Viktor was taken from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz on one of the final transports. He died soon after.

How were artists and musicians treated?18

National Socialism – Nazism – was always intended to be more than just a political movement. Politics and political power were seen as the means by which the Nazis could implement their ideology and reshape German, and eventually European, society. Culture would be crucial to these aims, and this was evident in the creation of the Reich Chamber of Culture. Through this institution Germany’s arts and culture were brought into line with Nazi beliefs, with art and artists that echoed Nazi ideology encouraged and promoted. A good demonstration of this was the work of Richard Wagner, a German composer whose compositions were enthusiastically embraced by the Nazi Party. In contrast, any art or artists that did not conform or fit into the way the Nazis believed the world should be were discriminated against. Such works were considered to be ‘degenerate’ and a threat to the well-being of German culture.

Music was one of the arts that the Nazis were particularly passionate about. This was made clear when soon after coming to power they established the Reich Music Office which was to control all musical activities in Germany. Almost immediately all professional musicians who were Jewish were dismissed, and the works of all Jewish composers were banned. Notable performers and famous scores by the likes of Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and Mahler were no longer heard in concert halls or on the radio, while pieces of music with Jewish links were Aryanized and re-titled. In response, a number of Jewish musicians chose to emigrate, including Arnold Schoenberg and Kurt Weill. Those who remained found an outlet in the Cultural Society of German Jews – an organisation which over the next eight years would hold hundreds of concerts and performances for Jews in Germany. However, such an organisation was limited in what it could do.

Rather than destroying Jewish culture, the creation of ghettos in Eastern Europe soon after the start of the war actually lead to an explosion of

Under the Third Reich, major cities were encouraged to organise large Mozart festivities. Concerts, operas, exhibitions and lectures were all given in the honour of the German hero . However, the Nazi’s appreciation of Mozart wasn’t without its problems. The text, or Libretto, for many of Mozart’s operas were written by a Jewish writer, Lorenzo da Ponte forcing the Nazis to attempt to Aryanise or even suppress some of Mozart’s greatest works including Cosi fan tutte, Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro.


cultural activity. Music played a particularly important role in providing relief from the harsh conditions of daily life, and many ghettos soon had their own orchestras. Ghetto musicians would play traditional pieces as well as writing new compositions. The value of music is well shown in an event which occurred in the Kovno ghetto in Poland in 1944. After many musicians were targeted by the Nazis for extermination in 1941, the Jewish Council in the ghetto made a police force from those who remained policemen in order to protect them. When the ghetto police were themselves sent to their deaths in 1944, only the musicians were spared.

Other examples of the importance of music in ghetto life come from Theresienstadt, where concerts, performances, and operas were a key part of the ghetto’s rich and remarkable cultural fabric. Theresienstadt was a concentration camp and ghetto near Prague in Czechoslovakia. Known in Czech as Terezin, Theresienstadt served as a transit centre for people to be deported elsewhere and as somewhere to house elderly Jews. The town was also frequently used by the Nazis for propaganda purposes, with staged photographs and films taken there apparently showing Jews living in peace and comfort. In reality living

A performance by the Kovno Ghetto Orchestra in 1944Reproduced with kind permission of Yad Vashem Reference & Information Services


conditions were as awful as many other places, but despite this a rich cultural scene developed in Theresienstadt. A host of different artists and performers spent varying amounts of time in the camp-ghetto, with famous composers like Viktor Ullman and Gideon Klein making sure that Theresienstadt became famous for its musical activities.

Music was also found within the camps of the Nazi empire. Here,orchestras were not normally formed by Jews but rather by the SS, partly for their own entertainment but also for public performances. These musical groups would commonly perform when trains arrived in the camps so as to reassure the new prisoners, but would also play as prisoners left for work or were being subjected to selections. Orchestras were found, not just in concentration camps, but even in the extermination centres such as Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Auschwitz-Birkenau. In this way the ability to make music both offered an opportunity to resist Nazi dehumanisation and the potential to increase one’s chance of survival – even if only for a few days, weeks or months.

The London Philharmonic Orchestra would like to thank Andy Pearce, Alex Maws and all at the Holocaust Educational Trust for their assistance in producing these resources.

Glossary21

Antisemitism Prejudice against and persecution of Jewish people

Auschwitz-Birkenau The largest Nazi death camp, located in Poland. Some 1.1 million Jews were killed there.

Belzec A death camp located in Poland where approximately 434,500 Jews and Gypsies were killed.

Chelmno The first camp to be used for the killing of Jews by poison gas.

Concentration camp A site built by the Nazis to imprison individuals and groups of people they considered ‘enemies of the state’, such as political opponents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Jews.

Death camp A site established by the Nazis with the sole purpose of killing people. There were four such camps, all located in Poland.

Deportation The rounding up of Jews from their homes for transportation in cattle wagons to ghettos and camps in Poland.

Euthanasia A programme followed by the Nazi government Programme from 1939, by which mentally and physically disabled men, women, and children were killed by starvation, lethal injection, or by gas. The programme was officially ended in the summer of 1941, although it continued unofficially up until the end of the war in 1945. It is estimated that in total some 200,000 were killed under the programme between 1939 and 1945.

Glossary22

Ghetto An enclosed area of a city, town or village where Jews were forced by the Nazis and their collaborators to live. Jews were not allowed to leave the ghetto without permission, and disease and overcrowding were rife.

Kindertransport The name given to a rescue mission that took place nine months prior to the outbreak of the war. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Nazi Germany and the occupied territories of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels and farms.

Kristallnacht Translated as ‘Night of Broken Glass’, Kristallnacht was a wave of national riots directed against German Jews between 9-10 November 1938. The events were triggered by the assassination of a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, by a 17 year-old Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan. Although not officially organised by the Nazi Party, the riots were instigated and led by Nazi members, Stormtroopers and the Hitler Youth.

Liberation The freeing of those imprisoned under the Nazis by Allied soldiers of Britain, the United States and Soviet Russia.

Majdanek A concentration camp located in Poland, which also served as an extermination centre.

Sobibor A death camp in Poland. The camp was constructed in the spring of 1942 and was dismantled by the end of 1943, by which time some 167,000 had been killed there.

Glossary23

SS An abbreviation of Schutzstaffel, the German word for ‘Protection Squads’ first formed as Hitler’s personal bodyguards in the 1920s. This organisation grew in power and influence during the 1930s, and came to oversee the concentration and death camps.

Star of David A traditional symbol of the Jewish people, used by the Nazis as a method of identifying and discriminated against Jews. The Star was sewn on to people’s clothes.

Theresienstadt Also known by its Czech name ‘Terezin’, Theresienstadt was a hybrid camp-ghetto housed in a garrison town in Czechoslovakia. Part transit centre, part ghetto, part labour camp, Theresienstadt operated from November 1941 to May 1945.

Treblinka A death camp in Poland. The camp opened in the summer of 1942 and was dismantled in the autumn of 1943. Between 870,000 and 925,000 Jews were killed there.

Michael Morpurgo24

Michael Morpurgo is one of the UK’s best-loved authors and storytellers. He was appointed Children’s Laureate in May 2003, a post he helped to set up with his friend Ted Hughes in 1999. He was awarded an OBE for services to Literature in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2007. He has written over 120 books, including Kensuke’s Kingdom which won the Children’s Book Award 2000 and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book Award and the Carnegie Medal in 2000. His novel, Private Peaceful, a harrowing story about the First World War, was published in autumn 2003. It won the 2004 Red House Children’s Book Award and the Blue Peter Book Award in 2005. His latest novel is Shadow published by Harper Collins in September 2010.

Many of Michael’s books have been adapted for the stage. These include Private Peaceful, Kensuke’s Kingdom, Why the Whales Came and The Mozart Question, and most notably, the National Theatre’s production of War Horse. This production of Michael’s moving and powerful story of survival on the Western Front reached number one in the Observer’s top ten theatre performances and was also awarded the best design prize in the Evening Standard Theatre Awards. This production has now moved to the West End’s New London Theatre. DreamWorks Studios announced in December 2009 that they had acquired the rights to the film War Horse.

Michael travels all over the UK and abroad talking to children and telling his stories and encouraging them to tell theirs.

In 1976, Michael and his wife, Clare, started the charity Farms for City Children. They help to run three farms around the country, in Gloucestershire, Pembrokeshire and North Devon. Each farm offers children and teachers from urban primary schools the chance to live and work in the countryside for a week, and gain hands-on experience. For more information about the work of Farms for City Children, please visit www.farmsforcitychildren.co.uk

Michael Morpurgo lives in Devon with his wife Clare. He has three children and seven grandchildren.

Michael Morpurgo’s website is www.michaelmorpurgo.com

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