Unit 9 Song of Defiance课文翻译大学英语三

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2024年7月1日发(作者：)

Unit 9 Song of Defiance

They confronted the Nazis with the only weapon they had: their voices.

When you walk the cobbled mist-shrouded streets of Terezin in the Czech

Republic, your mind fills with images of the village sixty years ago, when it was a

Nazi concentration camp packed with desperate and dying Jews. But Terezin was

not only a place of suffering. It was also a scene of triumph.

Terezin had been a perverse kind of showcase. In contrast to Auschwitz,

Treblinka and other extermination camps, the Nazis designed the town near

Prague to fool the world. For much of World War II, Nazi propaganda suggested

that Jews there enjoyed a life of leisure, even using captive Jewish filmmakers to

craft a movie showing "happy" Jews listening to lectures and basking in the sun.

The reality was horribly different. As many as 58,000 Jews were stuffed into a town

that had originally held 7,000. Medical supplies were almost nonexistent, beds

were infested with vermin and toilets overflowed. Of the 150,000 prisoners who

passed through Terezin, 35,000 died there, mostly from disease and hunger.

Yet the camp made concessions for propaganda purposes. SS troops were

posted outside the fortress, while daily activity was overseen by a Jewish “Council

of Elders,” which turned a blind eye to inmates’ activities, unless they might

attract Nazi attention.

So, amid the pervasive atmosphere of death, writers managed to write,

painters to paint, and composers to compose. Among them was Rafael Schaechter,

a conductor in his mid-30s. Charismatic, with a striking face and wavy, dark hair,

Schaechter was just beginning to make a name for himself in the rich cultural mix

of prewar Prague. He had scarcely thought of himself as Jewish at all, until he was

seized by the Nazis.

As his months in the camp stretched into years, and more and more Jews

disappeared eastward on Nazi transports. Schaechter’s fury at his captors

steadily grew. And then he thought of a daring plan.

He confessed his idea to his roommate in a single sentence: “We can sing to

Nazis what we can’t say to them.”

Their weapon was to be Verdi’s Requiem.

Everything that Schaechter wanted to say lay camouflaged within the Latin

words of the Requiem, with its themes of God’s wrath and human liberation.

Schaechter had access to no musical instruments except a broken harmonium

found in a rubbish heap. Other than that, he had only human voices to work with.

Throwing himself into the plan, he managed to recruit 150 singers.

Among the group was a brown-eyed teenager named Mrianka May. During

her 12-hour workday, she labored everything from scrubbing windows to making

tobacco pouches for German soldiers. At night, she slipped away to join the choir,

where she felt lifted up by Verdi’s music and Schaechter’s passion. “Without

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