Durst, Musik, Geheime Dienste

by Herbert Thomas Mandl

This is an autobiographical novel by Tommy Mandl (1926-2007), a musician, philosopher, author and psychologist. Mandl was a Czechoslovak Jew who grew up in the vibrant German-Jewish culture of prewar Czechoslovakia. In 1942, he and his parents were deported to the Terezin ghetto, where he played in the camp orchestra and took part in many other cultural activities that were the hallmark of the ghetto. His eyewitness accounts of every detail of camp life and of the brilliant outpouring of cultural activities in the ghetto are unique. In 1944, Mandl and his father were transported to Auschwitz, thence to several Dachau-Kaufering subcamps where his father died. In 1945, Mandl was liberated and repatriated to Czechoslovakia, returned to his studies, and received his doctorate in the performing arts (violin) in 1948. He and his wife Jaroslava (piano) began to teach at the Ostrava Academy of Music. As with Nazism, Mandl found Communism to be an oppressive system that was destructive of the h