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Don’t forget about me: The short life of Gideon Klein, composer and pianist, is the new biography by David Fligg about the remarkable Moravian-born musician who was murdered in an Auschwitz sub-camp, aged 25.
Klein was born in Přerov, but by the age of 11 he had moved to Prague, there developing his prodigious musical talents. By his teens, he was already well-respected within the capital’s astonishing inter-war musical and artistic circles. But Klein never forgot his Moravian roots, not least in December 1932 when he returned there to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah, on Shabbat Vayishlach, in Přerov’s synagogue.
Most likely, one of the three extant Přerov Torah scrolls now in the MST’s collection, would have been used on that occasion. These scrolls are MST#67 at Liverpool Reform Synagogue, MST#947 at Congregation Agudas Achim, Austin TX, and MST#1120, at the Jewish Day School of the Lehigh Valley, Allentown PA. The MST’s Quarterly Newsletter for autumn 2016 carried the article From Moravia to Merseyside: The Curious Story of a Torah Scroll, which focuses on David Fligg’s encounter with the Liverpool scroll.
Less than seven years after Klein’s Bar Mitzvah, the religious freedoms which Czech Jews under Tomáš Masaryk’s enlightened presidency enjoyed were stopped in one fell swoop. The Germans occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and Gideon Klein found himself imprisoned in the SS-controlled Terezín (Theresienstadt) prison camp and ghetto. David Fligg’s biography on Klein, the first full-length monograph on the musician in almost 30 years, details all of this: from Klein’s Moravian childhood to his final imprisonment in the Fürstengrube slave labour camp, via the liberal artistic milieu of pre-war Prague, and Klein’s tireless efforts to bolster prisoners’ spirits using music, to his final, tragic death. The book draws on first-hand, previously unpublished testimonies, interviews with those who knew Klein, and includes over 100 illustrations, many hitherto unpublished.
The book’s foreword was written by Zdenka Fantlová who remembered Klein from Terezin. Sadly, Zdenka passed away, aged 100, in November 2022, just five days before the book’s publication.
Don’t forget about me: The short life of Gideon Klein, composer and pianist is available from here. The Czech version, under the title Dopis od Gideona, was published by P3K Publishing, Prague, to mark the musician’s centenary in 2019. David Fligg, who is Honorary Research Fellow at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music, and Visiting Professor at Chester University, can be contacted at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
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