During his recent Middle East trip, President Bush paid a visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. While viewing aerial photos of Auschwitz, he reportedly asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice why the Allies hadn't bombed the camp during the war.
"We should have bombed it," the president is reported to have said.
With those five news-making words, Bush reopened one of history's most vexing questions: Why, when the Allies knew what was taking place at Auschwitz, did they not destroy the camp or the rail lines leading to it? Disputes over what was possible, advisable, or likely to be effective all surround the issue - which, as media responses to the president's remark show, remains painfully unresolved.
The timing of the incident was strangely auspicious for Lior Navok. The 36-year-old Israeli composer has spent much of the last year sifting through thousands of documents relating to the nonintervention and creating a new piece from them. The result is "And the Trains Kept Coming . . .," a work for orchestra, chorus, and soloists commissioned by the Cantata Singers. It will have its first performances tonight and Sunday, on a program with "The Prophets," an excerpt from Kurt Weill's "The Eternal Road."
Navok's piece is the third in the Cantata Singers' "Slavery Documents" series, which, the group says, "examines the human condition at moments of tragedy, challenge, and moral outrage." Yet when Navok first got the commission last year, such weighty themes weren't anywhere on his horizon.
"Usually it takes a lot of time to find subjects, texts," says the composer by phone, soon after arriving in Boston. "One needs to really connect with them very strongly." The idea for the piece came about a few weeks after receiving the commission, during a conversation with a friend. "Of course, we learned about that in school," Navok remembers saying when the friend mentioned the debate. But his friend began delving into the underlying political and strategic issues. At some point, the composer says, "a bell rings in my head.
"There is some sort of conflict, some dilemma," he continues, "a gap between one side that comes and says, 'Please help us' . . . and on the other by people who are in some sort of denial about what was going on, or not particularly interested to help."
So Navok began his research, which was conducted at Yad Vashem and the Central Zionist Ar chives in Jerusalem. He looked at a dizzyingly varied cross-section of the historical record: communications between the British and American war offices; committee reports on the refugee situation; letters to Churchill and Roosevelt, begging them to intervene; testimony from victims who had escaped; German train schedules, listing the number of prisoners to be sent to various camps. He even found a telegram from George Bernard Shaw to an unknown correspondent, in which Shaw explains, "I can do nothing to help Hungarian Jewry. Do you suppose that I am Emperor of Europe?"
"History just came [alive] in front of my eyes," Navok says. "I was holding these documents and thinking, 'Wow, this is the real thing.' "
Not, of course, that it was pleasant work. "It was a really hard process. After about an hour the headache would start. And I knew that I have thousands of documents to go through."
Last April he came to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire with copies of about a thousand documents, from which he began assembling a libretto, often with jarringly dissimilar texts arranged to create a sort of oblique narrative. A letter from a Czech prisoner to her husband - "On this, the last night of my life, I bid you farewell" - is followed by a chilling excerpt from a Nazi memorandum: "Referring to the Jewish Question, the Führer is determined to clear the table."
One section of the piece contains a single line of text, taken from a US newspaper ad placed by a Jewish activist group: "How well are you sleeping?"
Navok met with David Hoose, music director of the Cantata Singers, to show him the documents before he headed to MacDowell.
"One thing that surprised me was the quantity of the libretto he ended up using," says Hoose by phone. "For a piece that's 40 minutes long, there's a ton of text. Some of it occurs in layers, some of it you can understand, some of it you can't. It creates this sense of confusion and chaos, and that ends up putting the listener, and us, in the experience."
Navok and Hoose also discovered a shared affinity for trains, which, Navok says, ordinarily carry "this feeling of freedom, of discovery." In this context, though, they are converted into symbols of death. "And the Trains Kept Coming . . ." opens, appropriately, with the rhythm of those "horror trains," hammered out in the percussion.
The heterogeneous nature of the texts offered him the problem of how to convey the character of each text and speaker. "I have no operatic setting to convey that this person is a British minister, or that person is someone who did not eat for four days," he says. "So it means that the music should do everything. Instrumentation, harmony, melodic line, rhythms - everything had to do with defining each character in such a way that it would stand on its own."
One section exemplifies the many layers of meaning in Navok's score. The text comes from a dismissive letter written by a British official concerning the plight of Jewish refugees. "As for your letter . . . I will tell you frankly that we are not inclined to accept all of its contents verbatim," he says.
"I wanted to portray that he is sitting in his very cozy room listening to a gramophone playing Bach or Handel while writing his verdict about helping refugees," Navok says. While a narrator reads his words and a typewriter clacks away in the background, a piano plays what the composer calls "a kind of twisted Bach fugue that I wrote." The strings play eerie chords that give a halo of unreality to the official's words.
Finally, there is the choir, which functions as a sort of omniscient commentator, much as a Greek chorus would. When the official recommends that "one should learn from history to . . ." the chorus jumps in and exclaims "wake up!"
Like all artworks dealing with human catastrophes, "And the Trains Kept Coming . . ." bears a distinctive burden: the question of whether it can do justice to the sheer magnitude of suffering that occurred. It is a problem of which Navok was acutely aware.
"I was constantly afraid that the work is an understatement, of course," he says. "[The things that happened] are really unimaginables. But at the same time, I felt that it's in a way my duty.
"When you see these documents locked in archives," he continues, "the papers are paper, one on another. To me it was like the music comes to release these voices. It's like, in a positive way, letting a genie out of the bottle."
