František Weissenstein

František "Franta" Weissenstein , also František Weisenstein (born February 15, 1899 in Kolin , Austria-Hungary ; died around September 30, 1944 in Auschwitz concentration camp ), was a Czech opera singer ( tenor ) and victim of the Holocaust .

Life

Since the end of the First World War, František Weissenstein had had an unremarkable career on Czech opera stages with interpretations of compositions based on models by composers such as Smetana, Dvořák, Puccini and Lehár, as the career of the 40-year-old Jew with the annexation of his Czech homeland by the German National Socialists came to a standstill. On November 30, 1941, German agencies deported the singer from Prague to the Theresienstadt ghetto , where Weissenstein performed in the camp productions of the operas The Bartered Bride and The Kiss by Bedřich Smetana . On September 28, 1944, Weissenstein was transported to the Auschwitz extermination camp, where he was presumably gassed shortly after his arrival. Weissenstein's brother Josef, 17 years older than him, was murdered by the Nazis in Prague in 1942.

Web links

• František Weissenstein on holocaust.cz

literature

• Kay Less : Between the stage and the barracks. Lexicon of persecuted theater, film and music artists from 1933 to 1945 . With a foreword by Paul Spiegel . Metropol, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-938690-10-9 , p. 420.