Gerald Cohen & Deborah Brevoort: Steal A Pencil For Me
Sono Luminus

A topic such as the Holocaust is so monumental, it's understandable opera composers often opt for subject matter less daunting, be it a treatment inspired by a novel (Paul Moravec's The Shining) or film (Missy Mazzoli's Breaking the Waves). To their credit, composer Gerald Cohen and librettist Deborah Brevoort realized that the optimal approach for an opera based on the events of WWII was to narrow the focus to a small group of people, not the topic as a whole. Specifically, the two-act Steal a Pencil for Me concerns the love that developed between Jaap Polak, a Dutch accountant, and Ina Soep, the daughter of a wealthy diamond manufacturer, during their time at the Westerbork transit camp and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp between 1943 and 1945. That the opera isn't fictional but instead based on real people makes it resonate all the more powerfully. Like Anne Frank's diary, Jaap and Ina's story inspires for documenting the experiences of individuals determined to survive horrific circumstances.

How the work came about is itself fascinating. Cohen has a personal connection to the topic, given that his mother as a young teen witnessed the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany and his father's mother was killed by the Nazis in Poland (the composer's parents fled Europe in the 1930s). After he became a cantor in 1987, Cohen met Jaap and Ina, concentration camp survivors and originally from Amsterdam. Letters the two secretly exchanged at the camps were discovered by their daughter Margrit in their home's attic and in 2000 published as Steal a Pencil for Me. Upon reading the book and watching a 2007 documentary treatment by Michèle Ohayon, Cohen gravitated to the idea of their story as the basis for an opera, especially when he discovered it to be more complicated than he'd realized. When the thirty-year-old Jaap met Ina at a friend's birthday party in Amsterdam, he was smitten; however, he was already married, though he and his wife Manja were planning to divorce and were staying together during the war to protect each other. For her part, Ina, then twenty, was devoted to her boyfriend, but Rudi Acohen was then seized by the Nazis and deported to Poland, his fate unknown.

When Jaap, Manja, and Ina are deported to Westerbork, they end up in the same barracks, which leads to Jaap and Ina sharing clandestine love letters. Ultimately, they survived the war and were married for almost seventy years, she dying in 2014 and he a year later. Cohen and Brevoort spent many hours with the couple, who shared details about their time at the camps. When the opera was first presented in New York in a semi-staged workshop version in 2013, Jaap and Ina were present to witness the performances. Ari Pelto, the conductor of that version, later premiered the work with Opera Colorado in January 2018 and now appears on the recording alongside baritone Gideon Dabi (Jaap), soprano Inna Dukach (Ina), mezzo-soprano Adriana Zabala (Manja), Daniel McGraw (Rudi), Andrew Garland (Abraham, Ina's father), and Ricardo Rivera (the Commandant). A modest-sized instrumental ensemble of fourteen players gives the work an intimate chamber feel, and the number of singers is likewise small compared to many an opera.

After a plaintive intro, the two-and-a-quarter-hour work explodes with the revelry of party festivities in June 1943 and friends enjoying each other's company (“The Nazis occupy Amsterdam / But not our hearts, not our homes, Not our spirits!”). Jaap, Manja, Ina, and Rudi are among those celebrating Lisette's birthday, with the upbeat music turning yearning when Jaap lays eyes on Ina (“There's the girl I should have married!”) and reflects on his current unhappy union. The party's brutally interrupted when three Nazis, a Commandant and two officers, arrive and seize several Jews, including Rudi. Things turn bleak as Jaap, Manja, and others are deported to Westerbork in September, hear the prisoners ominously discuss what the “resettlement to the east” actually means, and eventually find themselves in the same barracks as Ina and her family. In anguish over the absence of Rudi and the life she once enjoyed, Ina's comforted by Jaap (“Spirits up, dearest lady! / The Nazis have locked up our bodies / But not our hearts, not our minds!”), and the two decide to sustain each other by meeting and sharing stories. After the Commandant organizes with militaristic precision the next transport's human cargo list, Jaap uses his discarded pencil to exchange letters with Ina, Lisette their go-between.

After the prisoners are deported from Westerbork in February 1944, the second act jumps three months later to Bergen-Belsen, the Commandant again taking stock (“Males on the left, females on the right! / You think we have all day for you, lousy Jewish swine!”) and the prisoners starving, wearing rags, and witnessing death daily. Meeting with Ina, Jaap describes “a vision of what life could be,” a life of ordinary breakfasts and their future as a couple. Such an idealized image stands in stark contrast to the pile of bodies Ina sees during act two's fourth scene, “Darkness descends,” and the words spoken to her by a Nazi soldier, “Just be glad you're not in Auschwitz, girlie.” Following the camp's liberation a year later, Jaap, after recovering from a near-fatal bout with typhus, and Ina joyfully reunite in Amsterdam, and with Rudi having died in Auschwitz and Manja granting Jaap a divorce he and Ina can finally enjoy their lives together.

January 2025