Down. He did what he needed. And. And then he was sent off to Auschwitz, to the death camps. The end of October of 1944. A very powerful film about Kurt Garrone's sellout is called Prisoner of Paradise. And it's it's very compelling because you see him using his talent to produce this film, and his talent was to get the prisoners to act and look as if they were in this model camp and to the point of of him. You know, he he had this potbelly because it diminished in size during his time in the camp. But of, you know, getting these little kids to giggle so that he could capture their smiling faces. I mean, and giving them candy. And and so they decorated the camp and painted the camp and fattened people up. Certainly sent off the ones to Auschwitz that needed to wouldn't be good for the show and fatten them up for a couple of months to produce this. So, I mean, he used his talent for evil and still paid the price. So, um, to get back on track, I became very aware of Terezin. I became fascinated with the music concerts that were performed and the music that was played, and there was a lot of self-identification there. It could have been me. I could have been born on the other side of the ocean. Just a few years earlier, it was more than 49. Instead of even my sister was born 43. She would have been carted away. Um, and I identified with the programs, identified with the repertoire, and identified the fact that, yes, my my, I was born a few years later. My parents had the fortune and my mother the foresight to move them over. It was Lithuania, not the Czech Czechoslovakia. But still people in Lithuania were murdered. Yeah. So I saw, oh, there's music here. And then I became aware of the music that was created there, and the composers that suffered and and sow the seeds of musical remembrance were born. And I, as I said, I moved in end of May 97th. And I the idea for the organization started to come together in the first year that I was in Seattle, and I basically didn't know anyone in Seattle because I just moved and I wasn't coming with a job. I was coming as an independent person, so there was nothing to latch on to. Um, but by the summer of 1998, I hadn't met half a dozen people. And I also sought the advice of Gerard Schwarz. I don't know how long you've been in Seattle, but he was okay. So he was the conductor of the Seattle Symphony up until the past five years, and Jewish and very involved in the community, and so I had the courage to ask if he would meet with me so I could tell him what my thinking was. And I said, you know, I'm new to the community. This is my idea. I want to establish at that time a concert series. I'm thinking of just concert in the fall, one in the spring, one to mark Kristallnacht, one to mark Yom Hashoah, and, um, over the year that I was in Seattle, from May to that following May, I was going to concerts, I was going to the symphony, and I was keeping my eye on musicians that impressed me. And so I just said, what do you think? Um, you know, my idea and, um, some of the players I might use. What are your thoughts? I'm thinking of putting it just in, maybe a community center or whatever. And he said, that's a great idea. Are you going to work very hard to do this. My advice to you, since you're working with serious performers and you want these concerts to be taken seriously, as music events put it in Benaroya Hall, Benaroya Hall was opening that fall. It was the fall of 1998, and we had this great concert hall. And the recital hall is fabulous, and that's what you should do. And then you said, all you can lose is money. Does your husband have a good job? And that became the very famous lines, you know, uh, when I, when I. Years later, when I told him that, I said, oh, did I say that, you know. But, um, so I started it as. So I developed it as a 501 C3 decided to file for that. End of August, we filed our Washington state certificate, and then we filed for federal 500 1C3. We got it in October, And I knew, as I said, half a dozen people. They became our Board of Remembrance. And I said, you know what? Um, just help me do this. You know, I nobody knew me from Adam. They were just taking a leap of faith that they believed in what I was doing, but they didn't know what I could do. Um, and I said, don't worry about the money. Uh, we will make sure that if it goes into a hole, we'll cover it. And we were in a position to put out a lot of money. Um, so our budget for the first year of those two concerts was $20,000. I worked for free. My husband worked for free. We only we didn't advertise. Except, you know, by letting people, you know, printing up stuff and telling the synagogues and by word of mouth. When we sold a ticket to the concert, the office was in my study. The phone rang at any time of day. I took every call. I, I sold everyone their ticket and we didn't have the tickets printed. I didn't even have a photocopy machine. We didn't have the tickets printed until we sold the seats. And then we went to Kinko's, and we printed out a few pages and cut off the ticket stubs. So for the first concert, I didn't know we were going to have 100 people or 500 people, because there was no way, you know, I mean, we had a full house and it was very rewarding. And after that concert, I got a number of people who called me, said, that was spectacular. I'd like to volunteer, I'd like to help. And then I developed a little bit of a workforce and a lot of goodwill. And the following year, since we had one year in operation, I started applying for grants. And in, um, it was in 2005 that we moved out of my study into an office space, and that office space is where we are now. It's an office in Magnuson Park. I was telling Lisa, just the city has a complex of nonprofit offices, and we hired our first employee. And then we've grown since then and developed the organization. But even from our second year was the mission of the organization to commission new works related to the Holocaust. And we made a point every year to commission a new piece that told a story and told stories that not were not limited exclusively to the voices of Jews. Of course, it's prominent, but to the voices of free thinkers, political dissidents, gypsies, gay people, women, children. So, um, now we're celebrating our 20th season. We have commissioned about 30 works. We've we've premiered and produced over 20 now, but we have a lot in the pipeline already. And in addition to the commissioning we have done, our projects have been increasingly huge. We've commissioned two operas that we've had produced and recorded that have been significant. And our third new commission, opera, is scheduled for a year from now, May 2019. These are fully staged costumed productions, and we've also expanded to performing in San Francisco. This will be our fourth year taking our production, our spring production to San Francisco.
