All events are open to the public. For more information, please call 319 273-2725.
Fall, 2007 Event Schedule
Concert Performance
September 16, 2007 2:00 p.m., Davis Hall, Gallagher-Bluedorn Performing Arts Center
Chamber Music Concert presented in conjunction with Music from the End of Time
Hindemith: Sonata for Clarinet and Piano
Haas: Suite for Piano, Op. 13
Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time
This performance continues the successful chamber music collaboration between Jason Weinberger and WCFSO Principal Cello Jonathan Chenoweth. Jason and Jonathan, along with guests Sean Botkin (piano) and WCFSO co-concertmaster Anita Tucker, will revisit the unusual story surrounding the genesis of Olivier Messiaen’s 1941 masterpiece Quartet for the End of Time. A special lighting and sound environment in Davis Hall will combine with Messiaen’s deeply spiritual music to transport the audience to the work’s first performance at the Stalag VIIIA prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. The program will also feature shorter works by important Holocaust-era composers including Pavel Haas, a gifted Jewish musician who perished at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.
Tickets are $12.00 and may be purchased by calling (319) 273-4TIX or at www.wcfso.org
http://www.wcfsymphony.org/chamber_performances.php
Lectures
October 17, 2007, 7:00 p.m., Schindler Education Center 244/245
"Resistance as a Response to German Oppression: A Comparative Approach"
Nechama Tec, Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of Stamford, Connecticut, will discuss her current research project, a comparative examination of Jewish and non-Jewish resistance groups under German occupation. She will describe how this project grew out of her Holocaust research and teaching. The focus of this presentation will be on pervasive views about Jewish resistance and why the validity of these views can be determined only through systematic comparative research of Jewish and non-Jewish resistance groups, their differences and similarities, and the conditions under which they emerged.
"Jewish Survival Through Work and Bribery: The Case of the Starachowice Factory Slave Labor Camps"
Christopher R. Browning, Frank Porter Graham Professor of History, University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, will examine the survival strategies of the Jews in the region of Wierzbnik-Starachowice who bribed German officials to create factory jobs in the Starachowice steel and munitions plants, then bribed German officials again to obtain the individual work cards for themselves and their families that spared them from deportation to Treblinka. Work and bribery were thus essential means of survival for those who were incarcerated in the Starachowice factory slave labor camps between October 1942 and July 1944.
October 18, 2007, 7:00 p.m., Schindler Education Center 244/245
Public Discussion Forum with Holocaust Scholars Nechama Tec and Christopher Browning
Using their current projects on Jewish and non-Jewish resistance and on the Starachowice Slave Labor Camps, the two scholars will describe how their disciplines of sociology and history inform their research. They will also discuss the problems they have confronted in using oral testimony and written records to understand the Holocaust, as well as their collaborative efforts on a new book in which they use a series of letters to shed light on both the victims and the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
November 6, 2007, 7:00 p.m., Seerley Hall 115
RESCHEDULED FOR: November 8, 2007, 7:00 p.m.
Seerley Hall 115
“Holocaust Memory and Jewish Identity in Soviet and Post-Soviet Ukrainian Shtetls”
Anna Kushkova, Ethnology Department, “Petersburg Judaica” Center, European University at St. Petersburg, Russia, will discuss life and culture of the shtetls (Yiddish for “little towns”) and their importance for the identity of Eastern European Jews. Using materials collected through field research conducted from 2004 through 2007 in three former shtetls in Ukraine, she will also explore how the current residents of these communities remember and document the Holocaust in narrative practices, and how their narratives are modified for different audiences --such as Jewish charity organizations, local authorities, and researchers—in the post-Soviet era.
Film Series: Resistance during the Holocaust
September 27, 2007 7:00 p.m. Hearst Center for the Arts
Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005)
This is the true story of one of the members of White Rose, a German student-led underground resistance movement in Munich, is brought to thrilling life in this multi-award winning drama. Armed with long-buried historical records of her incarceration, director Marc Rothemund expertly re-creates the last six days of Sophie Scholl’s life: a heart-stopping journey from arrest to interrogation, trial and sentence. In German with English subtitles. Running time: 117 minutes.
October 25, 2007 7:00 p.m. Hearst Center for the Arts
Unlikely Heroes (2003)
Produced by Oscar-winning Moriah Films of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, this documentary is a moving and fascinating look at lesser-known profiles in courage: a rabbi's son disguised as a high-ranking Nazi, a therapist teaching children to secretly draw and paint to escape the camp’s horrors, Polish sisters in Auschwitz smuggling gunpowder from a munitions factory to blow up a crematorium, a young French boy surviving by performing songs for fellow Jews and Nazis alike who later changed his name to Robert Clary, of "Hogan's Heroes" fame. Directed by Richard Trank. Running time: 120 minutes.
November 29, 2007 6:00 p.m. Hearst Center for the Arts
Uprising (2001)
In the first American film to dramatize the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, where an underground resistance movement of Polish Jews held off the Nazis longer than did the entire country of Poland, noted director Jon Avnet maintains a sense of courage and hope amidst the palpable horror of the Ghetto, combining physical and historical accuracy with intimate character details. Hank Azaria leads an all-star cast including David Schwimmer, Leelee Sobieski, Donald Sutherland and Jon Voight. Running time: 180 minutes.
All events except the September 16 concert are free and open to the public. For more information, please visit www.uni.edu/holocaust or call 319 273-2725.
Series poster and brochure designed by Roy R. Behrens, Graphic Design Program, UNI Department of Art. Holocaust image copyright © by Roy R. Behrens.
