Poems From the Holocaust Revisited: Performance and Panel October 20 7:00pm

by Lara Canner, Allan Blank Curator of Music Special Collections

Composer Allan Blank wrote the moving work entitled “Poems From the Holocaust” based upon children’s poetry found at the concentration camp of Terezin after itshttps://flic.kr/p/2mAdcdz liberation in 1945. The composition for mezzo-soprano, double bass, and piano features five pieces that were written to evoke an emotional response from the audience.

During World War II, the Third Reich turned the Terezin fortress located in the modern Czech Republic, into a concentration camp for Jewish writers, artists, and scholars. More comparable to a prison than an extermination camp, such as the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Nazis falsely presented the camp to the rest of the world as a “spa town” when pressed for details by the Red Cross. The reality was that Terezin acted as a collection point for transferring people to ghettos or death camps. Art classes were forbidden, but artist and educator Friedl Dicker-Brandeis brought the children together in secret, where they could create, learn, express their emotions, and hopefully regain a bit of their lost childhood. After the war, many of the writings, artwork and poems were collected by Hana Volavková, who was an art historian and Holocaust survivor.

Allan Blank included the first lines of one of the poems in his composition At Terezin, which reads: “When a new child comes everything seems strange to him. What on this ground I have to lie? Eat black potatoes? No! Not I! I’ve got to stay?” The last lines of At Terezin read: “Here in Terezin, life is hell. And when I’ll go home again I can’t yet tell.” Sadly it is possible that the young writer of this poem most likely never made it back home, of the 15,000 children imprisoned at Terezin, only 150 survived.

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Poem from the book I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from the Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944 by Hana Volavková From ODU Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives Rare Book Collection

On October 20th at 7pm Old Dominion Libraries will host a performance of Allan Blank’s work “Poems From the Holocaust” followed by a panel discussion. The event support’s ODU’s Fall 2021 Themester’s Art and Social Justice theme by prompting listeners to never forget the tragedy of the Holocaust’s youngest victims through music. 

The performance and panel discussion will be available to watch live via Zoom. Registration is open now: https://oduonline.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_R9fiZvIUTJC3-LAF1VTXrQ

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COVID-19 and Beyond: How ODU Has Stepped Up to Meet Crises Throughout Its History

By Steven Bookman, University Archivist

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Women students in the war-training program work on an airplane

As Virginia, the United States, and the World are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, Old Dominion University is rising to meet the challenge. For the health and safety of its students, staff, and faculty, the University closed its facilities, moved all its courses online, and will hold a virtual Monarch Grad Week to celebrate students graduating in May 2020. The entire Monarch community has come together to help slow down the Coronavirus by making masks for their fellow Monarchs, providing meals for the community, and volunteering for the Virginia Medical Reserve Corps.

However, this isn’t the first time ODU has faced adversity in the face of a crisis. International wars, the September 11 terrorist attacks, and the H1N1 pandemic have cause the University to respond in a variety of ways.

World War II

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Sally Avery holding her nephew, George Shipp, Jr., points out her uncle Robert Turner whose name is on the Alumni War Memorial plaque.

Well before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Norfolk Division of William & Mary, as Old Dominion was known from 1930 to 1960, was already heavily involved in the war effort. An Aircraft Instruments Institute was established at the division in 1938 to train students to operate and repair aircraft instruments. The following year, a war training program was established on campus, allowing students to take courses related to aircraft mechanics and welding, radar, and topographical mapping, among others. At a time when colleges were losing enrollment with male students leaving to fight the war, the enrollment at the division remained steady and even grew during the war. Under the direction of Lewis W. Webb, Jr., the war training program offered free classes for women such as aircraft repair, drafting, and other war-related topics. Officers from Naval Station Norfolk, including several African American sailors, took classes at the division. By the end of World War II, approximately 5,000 people enrolled in the war training program, the largest on the East Coast.

September 11, 2001

The morning of September 11, 2001 began like any other Tuesday morning on campus. Students went to their classes as usual, but when highjacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers, Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania Field, word spread rapidly. The ODU community, as it always has, reacted quickly to help with those in need. Shuttle service was organized for students, faculty, and staff to give blood at the Norfolk Scope, the History Honor Society collected bottle water and socks to give to first responders in New York and Washington, D.C., and a room in Webb Center was reserved for Monarchs to pray, remember, and reflect. Three students and an alumnus lost their lives during the attacks: Army Lieutenant Colonel Karen Wagner, Army Specialist Craig Amundson, Navy Lieutenant Commander Robert Elseth, and alumnus Robert Schlegel, ’92.

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ODU students attend a 9/11 vigil

H1N1, 2009

In April 2009, the first human infected with H1N1, a flu-like virus similar to the current Coronavirus, was reported in the U.S. Unlike the Coronavirus, H1N1 mostly infected children and young adults. ODU Student Health Services was quick to send out recommendations by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to combat the virus. By July, Human Resources encouraged offices and departments to come up with plans for teleworking in preparation for an outbreak in the fall. A vaccine was developed in September and H1N1 flu clinics were held on campus beginning in November. By the time the CDC declared the pandemic over in August 2010, only a small number of Monarchs were infected.