Stories of the Holocaust have been told in memoirs, novels and films. But never before in the form of a multimedia rock opera.



“I didn’t set out to create this piece that I liken to a cross between Bernstein’s Mass and The Wall,” says composer and lyricist Jeremy Schonfeld, the son of an Auschwitz concentration camp survivor. “The intent was to cover the emotional landscape. I really was just trying to tell my story as specifically as I could.”

Iron & Coal explores how the Nazi genocide casts a shadow across generations. It is inspired by the memoir of Schonfeld’s late father, Gustav, who as a 10-year-old boy was imprisoned in Auschwitz and other camps. Blending rock-infused anthems with traditional Jewish prayers and classical music, the show portrays Gustav’s struggle with survivor’s guilt and his building of a new life in America.

But at its heart is a tender father-son relationship. Schonfeld, 48, describes the work as telling “two different memoirs simultaneously: a father who tells his through his book and a son who tells his through his music.

“My hope is that people will look at this not just as a Jewish piece or as a ‘Holocaust piece’ because I really am about the emotional. That’s father-son. That’s family, that’s multigenerational. How we view the past and how that informs on the present and the future. I think that that goes across all cultures and religions.”

Schonfeld first distilled his complex feelings about his father and family history in a rock concept album in 2011, produced in Vienna, Austria. The title, Iron & Coal, refers to Gustav’s will to survive but also “the darkness, the charred remains emotionally internally of those who survived. So the strength of will but also the depth of emotional darkness that was there.”



Jeremy Schonfeld rehearsing. Photograph: Gabrielle Tillenburg

Gustav heard rough cuts of the album but died on the day it was being mastered. From 2012 to 2014, Schonfeld worked with choreographers and visual artists to create a full multimedia theatrical presentation, which receives its world premiere this week at the Music Center at Strathmore, North Bethesda, Maryland.



The show, directed by Kevin Newbury, deploys passages from Gustav’s memoir, projection, animation and more than 200 musicians on stage, including a rock band, chamber orchestra and choirs. There are three characters: Old Gustav (played by Rinde Eckert), Young Gustav (played by Lincoln Clauss) and Jeremy, who plays himself. Three intersecting storylines explore Gustav’s experiences as a child, the profound impact they had on him as a man, and how those experiences shaped Schonfeld.

The composer’s closeness to his father is evident as he talks. “He was clinical and he was scientific and his approach was very different than mine, which was very much the heart on the sleeve, the emotional, the raw and the trying to dive in, peel the layers of the onion, that kind of thing. So I think that he really valued the idea that he had a son who approached the subject matter in a very different way than he did.”

Gustav was torn from his home in Munkacs, Hungary, as a boy and taken by cattle car to Auschwitz in 1944. Alongside his father, Gustav witnessed atrocities at the hands of the Nazis and lost many family members, including his seven-month-old brother.

Asked if his father was ever able to forgive the perpetrators, Schonfeld recalls his own visit to the site at Auschwitz. “You had a crematorium in Auschwitz I and then there was this little road and directly across the street was your little beer garden. These guys would go home for the day’s siesta and then they would go and have have a beer and a schnitzel and they’d go home. To me that’s just mind boggling. I don’t think you can wrap your head around it. How do you forgive that?”

He adds: “He was a believer in the sons shouldn’t be blamed for the sins of the father but I think forgiveness was very hard. He did go over to that part of the world a few times to see family. But I’m not sure that forgiveness was ever going to be part of the answer for him because it’s hard to forgive what you don’t understand.”

Gustav and his parents survived the Holocaust and eventually started a new life in America. He married and raised a family and became a respected scientist and scholar. He died in 2011 aged 77.

Schonfeld, who grew up in St Louis, Missouri, and now lives Brooklyn, New York, recalls: “When I asked what he hoped this album, this work, would contain he said, ‘Well, I hope it will contain an element of hope and a positivity because, aside from that one year, I’ve lived a very good life.’ So there was definitely that side to my father but there was another side as well which would say to me the title of his book, Absence of Closure. Throughout his life he spent years searching for answers that he was just never going to find and that was difficult.

“And then there’s the certain questions that survivors and then their children have that are very specific and very much in the past, which is the idea that you survived for a reason, and what that reason is and what that means. What you define as success and important are defined by the weight of that question.”