"The Destination of the Missing"

This videoclip is taken from a musictheatre performance of ARBOS-Company for Music and Theatre. The music is done by the composer Werner Raditschnig. The text is written by Herbert Thomas Mandl (1926-2007) with an autobiographic background. Mandl was a survivor of the Holocaust. And in his time being arrested in the concentration camps he was real between life and death. Mandl was one of the few "Muselman" who survived (about that fact the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote the essay "Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive" original in Italian language 1998, translated to English in 2000 and to German in 2003). Mandl in all was a real witness of the history of the 20th century. His father served in the Austrian-Hungarian army during World War I. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis the family Mandl was sent to the concentration camp of Terezín. Herbert Thomas Mandl and his father were also sent to Auschwitz. After the death marches the father of Mandl died at the concentration camp München-Kaufering IV. Herbert Thomas Mandl survived. He was freed by American forces, his mother survived also the Holocaust. In Czechoslovakia after 1945 he worked as a musician and teacher for violin. In the beginning of the sixties of the 20th century Mandl and his wife made a spectacular escape through the Iron Curtain. Mandl organised his flight to the West about Egypt. His wife escaped through the Iron Curtain in the car of Heinrich Böll (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature). On the videoclip the two performers are Rita Hatzmann and Christina Scherzer (and the voice of the composer).