Tomorrow will mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Red Army, 60th Army of the Ukranian Front, under Field Marshall Konev.
Between 1940 and 1945, 1,198,000 people were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Last Saturday, BBC 2 aired a musical concert which was recorded in the camp itself at different locations with full orchestra and soloists. I found it a harrowing experience.
Much of the music was atonal: Messiaen's Quartet For The End Of Time (which he wrote while a PoW) stays in my mind as does the sequence from Victor Ullman's opera The Prince Of Atlantis.
Ullman was a pupil of Schoenberg (considered decadent by the Nazis) and wrote his opera in Terezin camp but died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz without ever hearing his work performed. Now, at last, in the place where he had died, his spirit was allowed to sing.
Specially commissioned pieces included a solo violin piece in memory of the 44,000 gypsies murdered in this camp and another work on horns which rang out from the woods where so many of the unfortunate victims awaited their fate.
The music resolved to the diatonic scale with a wonderful JS Bach violin concerto where the soloist walked while playing through the camp and out into the fields beyond.
I hope this week we can all find time to remember the innocent people who had their lives cut short in such a brutal manner.
I hope, too, parents can find time to tell their children about this terrible phase showing man at his worst.
We must never face a time when people are allowed to forget.
-Anthony Arundell, Hove
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