Brundibar Revisited

This documentary film explores the impact of Hans Kràsa’s children’s opera, “Brundibar”, which was performed more than 50 times between 1943 and 1944 by Jewish children in the Terezin/Theresienstadt ghetto. The simple story of the struggle against evil was abused by the Nazis as a propaganda tool and was used for by those imprisoned in the camps to symbolise the victory of good over evil.

At the heart of this documentary is a performance of ‘’Brundibar’’ by a Berlin-based youth theatre group, the Zwiefachen. The members of the group are young people from different ethnic backgrounds who live on the fringes of society.

They travel to Terezin/Theresienstadt to learn about the terrors of the Third Reich, and the conditions in which the opera played such a crucial role. The group is accompanied by Greta Klingsberg, a charismatic elderly lady from Israel and one of the few survivors of the original cast of Brundibar. She takes the young Germans on a trip back in time and, slowly, they start questioning their attitudes and apathy towards German history.