Central City Opera Presents Regional Premiere, ‘Two Remain: Memories of Auschwitz’

The Central City Opera presents the regional premiere of Two Remain: Memories of Auschwitz, coming July 16, 20, 21 and 28 to the St. James United Methodist Church in Central City. This short, two-act opera is based the stories of two Holocaust survivors: Krystyna Zywulska and Gad Beck. Their stories explore the nature of survival and the personal turmoil that follows surviving trauma.

“The opera is sung in English, and the music is lyrical offering broad appeal,” writer Gene Scheer says. “The music and stories can be enjoyed by both seasoned opera fans and opera newbies.” The opera was commissioned by Music of Remembrance and made possible by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Music of Remembrance Commissioning Circle. It was first performed in May 2016 at the Nordstrom Recital Hall in Seattle, Washington.

Act one focuses on Krystyna Zywulska, a political prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her Jewish identity hidden, she was assigned to the Effektenkammer to take and catalogue the personal belongings of women and children before they were murdered in the gas chambers. Krystyna secretly composed new lyrics to established, recognizable tunes to inspire her fellow prisoners. These became anthems of defiance. Many years after the war, a journalist gives Krystyna a tape player and asks her to record her stories of that time. Haunted and helped by the ghosts of her past—Zosia, Edka, Mariola, and her younger self—She struggles to find the words.

Act two tells Gad Beck’s story. Gad is a gay man whose true love, poet Manfred Lewin, was murdered at the age of 19 alongside his entire family. In the many years since the war, Gad tried to forget what happened even as he keeps a book of Manfred’s original poems close by. As an old man, Gad is visited by Manfred’s ghost one night. Manfred implores Gad to celebrate their love, and the painful truth about their fates emerges.

Homosexuality was against the law, and an estimated 100,000 men and women were imprisoned and sent to camps for their sexuality during the Holocaust. Homosexuality remained against the law until 1969, long after the war ended.

“Performed by an intimate cast of seven, this opera is a study and meditation on the nature of survival,” Scheer says. Source material includes documents and journals in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Zywulska’s book, I Survived Auschwitz, and interviews, including several collected from the film Paragraph 175.

Photo courtesy of Central City Opera