2026 Community Yom HaShoah Commemoration: The Grey Zone
Image credit: Hilary Scott
Join us for a community commemoration of Yom HaShoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day event featuring Mark Ludwig and musicians from the Terezin Music Foundation Ensemble.
A memorial candle lighting, prayers and a moment of silence in memory of those murdered in the Holocaust will follow the program which will focus on the "grey zone" as described by Primo Levi through both the historical example of Terezín and the lived experiences of Jews today. Please register below. If you register but are unable to attend, please let us know so that we can make the seat available to other community members.
Co-sponsored by Jewish Federation of the Berkshires and the Tanglewood Learning Institute.
The great writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi developed and explored the concept of the “grey zone” in one of his final essays. Reflecting on relationships between the Nazis and his fellow prisoners in Auschwitz, Levi observed that “the network of human relationships inside the lagers [concentration camps] was not simple; it could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors.” In Levi’s grey zone, oppressors compel their victims to become unwilling accomplices.
Drawing from his book Our Will to Live, Terezín Music Foundation Director Mark Ludwig will share stories of how the music of Jewish composers — along with other artistic expression in the Terezín concentration camp — was co-opted for Nazi propaganda. This grey zone was exploited through a propaganda film and a staged International Red Cross inspection, turning creativity and culture into instruments of deception.
