In Silence (2014) is a stylized docu-drama drawing on the lives of real Jewish musicians in Czechoslovakia and Germany who were persecuted during the Holocaust.

Before the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, Edith Kraus is an acclaimed concert pianist and Alice Flachova an aspiring teenage ballerina. In 1942, both are deported to the Terezin concentration camp 40 miles north of Prague. Terezin, or Theresienstadt in German, was a notorious Nazi propaganda weapon, sold to Red Cross observers as a “model” internment facility whose inmates enjoyed classical music concerts and relatively comfortable living conditions.

The reality was much grimmer. Out of 144,000 Jews sent to Terezin, over 88,000 were later deported to death camps while 33,000 died in squalid conditions. Only about 17,000 survived. Kraus escaped extermination purely because she could play Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Chopin and Verdi from memory.

In parallel with Kraus and Flachova, In Silence also tracks the persecution of other musicians, composers and conductors, including the German-Jewish vocal group Comedian Harmonists, who eventually disbanded under Nazi pressure and scattered abroad.

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