Ela Stein Weissberger is one of a hundred Terezin children who survived World War II. She was born on June 30, 1930 to Max and Marketa Stein. In 1939, her childhood became very different from that of her contemporaries. According to Neurenberg Laws, all Jewish children were expelled from school. Ela left the fourth grade and was only allowed to study in semi-legal courses organized for Jewish children.

Soon thereafter, all Jews in Prague had to wear a yellow Star of David and abide by an eight o’clock curfew. This was but one of the increasing senseless anti-Jewish orders that affected day-to-day life.

On February 12, 1942, Ela and her sister Ilona, mother, grandmother and uncle, Dr. Ouo Altenstein, (her father died of unknown causes), were deported to Terezin where they spent three and a half years. In July of 1942, Ela was separated from her family and moved to the Girls Home L410, Room #28, where she stayed with girls her own age. She worked in the gardens called Landwirtschaft. The Germans allowed children to play, pain with Bauhaus artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, and sing Hans Krasa’s children’s opera, Brundibar. (The Brundibar score was smuggled in by Rudy Freudenfeld and taught by Gideon Klein.) Brundibar’s gleeful, infectious music helped lift the spirits of the children inmates, many of whom performed in it. Most of the children died at Auschwitz, along with the opera’s composer. Ela played the part of the cat in fifty-five performances. The opera was used in the Nazi propaganda film, The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews.

The last transport from Terezin was October 28, 1944. At last it looked like the liberation was coming. Hope behind the mountain, the lesson that Friedl Dicker-Brandeis tried to give the children, was coming close. On May 5, 1945, they were liberated.

After liberation, Ela attended Art School. In 1949, the family immigrated to Israel. Ela became a sergeant in the Israeli Army, where she met and married Leopold Weissberger. Ten years later they moved to New York City.

American collaborative pianist Kayo Iwama has concertized extensively with singers throughout North America, Europe and Japan and has performed in some of the most prestigous venues including the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, Weill Recital Hall, Boston’s Jordan Hall, the Gardner Museum, Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood, the Kennedy Center, Tokyo’s Yamaha Hall and the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. The Washington Post has caller her a pianist “with unusual skill and sensitivty to the music and the singer” and the Boston Globe has praised her “virtuoso accompaniment…super-saturated with gorgeuos colors”. Formerly on the faculty at the Hartt School of Music, she is now on the faculties of the New England Conservatory of Music and Boston Conservatory and teaches at the Tanglewood Music Center. At Tanglewood, where she is coordinator of the opera and vocal studies programs, she works with some of today’s most exciting young singers and collaborative pianists and has assisted Maestros Stefan Asbury, Seiji Ozawa and Robert Spano in major operatic and concert productions. Her teaching has also taken her to some of the foremost universities of the United States to give master classes and performance/demonstrations. A resident of the Boston area, she is a frequent performer on WGBH radio, and has performed with such groups as the Handel and Haydn Society and Emmanuel Music. For the past ten years she has been the pianist and music director of the critically acclaimed Cantata Singers Chamber Series, programs devoted to rarely-heard works of art song and vocal chamber music.

Miss Iwama earned a Bachelor of Music degree at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and her Master’s at the State University of New York at Stony Brook where she studied with Gilbert Kalish. She also attended the Salzburg Music Festival, the Banff Music Center, the Music Academy of the West and the Tanglewood Music Center, where she worked with such artists as Margo Garrett, Martin Isepp, Graham Johnson, Martin Katz and Erik Werba. She has served previously on the music staffs of the Steans Institute at the Ravinia Festival and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Miss Iwama can be heard on CD on the Well-Tempered label, with baritone Christópheren Nomura in Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin, and on two ISMM discs devoted to French m é lodies and the songs of Schumann with tenor Ingul Ivan Oak. She is married to pianist Frank Corliss and has two children.

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