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Performer brings family's Holocaust experience alive

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A chance discovery has led to a Canadian composer creating music that honours her family’s experience during the Holocaust.

Lenka Lichtenberg came across about 65 poems her grandmother had written while in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

"It was really, really very powerful for me to find these because I didn't know my grandmother as a creative artist at all," said Lichtenberg.

Lichtenberg adapted the poems for Thieves of Dreams, which was awarded a Juno in 2023 for Global Music Album.

Both Lichtenberg's grandmother and mother survived the Holocaust, while her grandfather died in Auschwitz.

Lichtenberg will perform The Secret Poetess of Terezin June 2 at Studio Bell.

She says musicians will use instruments from Violins of Hope, an exhibit that features violins owned by European Jews before and during the Second World War.

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