A group of NYMT young company members together with students from CORE Education were invited to Buckingham Palace to perform for The King and members of the Royal Household. This was as part of Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2025. Matilda captured these thoughts about the experience.

I first heard about the Echo Eternal project last year when I was involved in a performance piece aimed at bringing testimonies from survivors to life and was incredibly honoured to be invited back this year.

The aim of Echo Eternal is to educate and promote Holocaust awareness to ensure that such atrocities are never committed again. The way in which we achieved this was through combining the video testimonies of Zdenka Fantlova and Zigi Shipper with music by Ilse Weber, Daniel Galbreath and David Childs to create a multi-media performance to show our own commitment to keeping these stories alive. Our job as performers was not to perform, but to ensure that their messages of hope, resilience and kindness are never forgotten.

As a part of this project, I have felt closer to the stories of the survivors through hearing testimonies first-hand or in video interviews, which has massively affected me as someone who studied the Holocaust at school. By putting names and faces and deeply personal stories to this part of history it feels even more important to make sure that these remarkable testimonies live forever.  

It is an immense challenge as a performer to do justice to this material, which at first glance feels far removed from my own life, but it was through listening and learning that I discovered that these were messages not just specific to the Holocaust but to humanity as a whole. The creative process to attempt to communicate this universal and important message of kindness and determination involved the whole room having to work together to shine a spotlight not on our individual performance but on the words of survivors. As a musical theatre performer I had to put my desire to perform to one side. There was no acting involved and this felt very vulnerable at the time, as I allowed myself to be moved and affected by the testimony in the same way as the audience, without the veil of a character. This was a universal experience in the room as everyone opened themselves up to this level of emotion which felt incredibly empowering. I was able to see how our performance was going to affect those who watched it by seeing the impact that it had on all of us in rehearsals. It was powerful to see how everyone zoned in on the importance of the piece and the focus in the room was a true testament to the respect we all felt for the message.

I would like to draw particular attention to the words of survivor Zdenka Fantlova whose unbelievable resilience I found so inspiring. At the end of her video testimony included in our performance she spoke of her resilience and bravery in the face of the very worst of humanity and how it is applicable to everyone regardless of whether you have encountered that evil or not. Her final remark was incredibly simple as she said, ‘it is your attitude to life’, which struck me as such an elegant way to describe the importance of courage and strength and how we must apply that to every aspect of our lives. As a performer this has inspired me to use performance as a vessel for a wider message especially through music. Music reaches a part of the brain that words cannot, and so by combining our message with incredibly beautiful melodies and the emotive violin playing from Karolina Przasnyska our hope is that the testimonies of Zigi, Zdenka and all the survivors stay alive to inspire future generations, so that we never forget not only the atrocities committed during the Holocaust but also the unbelievable stories of human kindness and bravery that came out of such a dark time.