Matzoh Brie with Prunes and Wine

At the Terezin concentration camp, a vibrant but surreal cultural life was played out against the horrific backdrop of starvation, disease, and death. There, children teeming with lice watched performances of the opera Brundibar, and elderly Jews, bodies wracked with enteritis, scavenged for potato peels before attending lectures on theology.

A holding pen where Jews—largely from Moravia and Bohemia, as well as prominent Jews from Germany, Austria, and Western Europe—were kept befor