Lenka Lichtenberg

ALBUM IS BASED ON POEMS LENKA LICHTENBERG’S GRANDMOTHER WROTE WHILE IMPRISONED AT THE THERESIENSTADT CONCENTRATION CAMP

When Lenka Lichtenberg’s mother passed away in 2016, the Czech-Canadian singer discovered discover two small faded light blue square notebooks from the 1940s in her mother’s old desk drawer in Prague. The notebook contained her grandmother Anna Hana Friesova’s handwritten poetry about her experiences in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. 

“There before my eyes, were tattered pages with the dreams of my young grandmother – and her nightmares in the camp,” explains Lichtenberg. “The stories she never told me. Her lifelong hopes that were ripped away during the Holocaust. So, I embarked on a quest to share her writing from the darkest moments in modern history – and to bring her voice back to life in the way I best know how – as music.” 

 

The result is a stunning project spanning eight decades and three generations that will be released on May 6, 2022. Lichtenberg was surprised to discover that a majority of the poems were intimate fantasies and love poems that you’d never expect to be written on the brink of death. The poems were set to music by seven Canadian and Czech composers, and all are bathed in Lichtenberg’s signature 3-octave harmonies.