© 2026 Blue Ridge Public Radio
Blue Ridge Mountains banner background
Your source for information and inspiration in Western North Carolina.
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

‘The Defiant Requiem’ Remembers Artistic Resilience During The Holocaust

In June 1944, a group of Jewish prisoners performed Giuseppe Verdi’s “Requiem Mass” to a group of Nazi officers at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The performance was a subversive and artistic act of defiance by the Jewish prisoners. In 2008, Maestro Murry Sidlin founded The Defiant Requiem Foundation to commemorate the event. Sidlin conducts Verdi’s “Requiem Mass” alongside testimonies and footage from the concentration camps.Host Frank Stasio speaks with Maestro Murry Sidlin about “The Defiant Requiem: Verdi Requiem at Terezin”, which he will conduct with the UNC Symphony Orchestra.

Host Frank Stasio talks with Sidlin about the legacy of the performance and the act of commemoration. Sidlin conducts “The Defiant Requiem: Verdi Requiem at Terezin” with the UNC Symphony Orchestra and campus vocal ensembles at Memorial Hall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Thursday, April 20 at 7:30 p.m.​

Hours of Freedom: The Story of the Terezin Composer (Prague, 2015)
John Campbell /
Hours of Freedom: The Story of the Terezin Composer (Prague, 2015)

Copyright 2017 North Carolina Public Radio

Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.
Charlie Shelton