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Please join the Harriman Institute for an event with Alexandra Birch and Jui-Ling Hsu.

On January 27, 1945, the Red Army liberated the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Today, this date holds special significance as International Holocaust Remembrance Day marking the 6-9 million Jews, Sinti and Roma, POWs, Slavs, and other marginalized groups murdered by the Third Reich and their collaborators at Auschwitz and across Europe. In a synthesis of music, contemporary sound recordings, and discussion, Drs. Alexandra Birch and Jui-Ling Hsu present a musical commemoration of the Holocaust. In addition to a fragment of the lost prewar violin sonata of the composer Viktor Ullmann who was murdered at Auschwitz, this program also includes the magnificent first sonata of Sergei Prokofiev reconceived as a musical memorial for the murdered Soviet POWs, sound recordings from Auschwitz-Birkenau taken in 2024, a sonically vivid piece by the Ukrainian-Jewish violinist Emil Leyvand, and the first violin sonata of Soviet-Jewish evacuee Mieczyslaw Weinberg. Together, this meaningful program remembers the murdered and prosecuted artists of the Holocaust as artists rather than as victims, provides a more complete picture of the Holocaust from camps to the atrocities in the USSR, and aims to tell the story of a handful of individuals in incomprehensible violence.