Guernsey Holocaust service features music saved from bombed city
2025-01-27
Category: entertainment

A piece of music found in a German city that was heavily bombed during World War Two is to be performed at a Holocaust Memorial Day service in Guernsey later.Andante, which is based on a fragment of a manuscript by 18th Century Venetian composer Albinoni, is being performed by the Guernsey Music Centre String Quartet made up of students from several schools.The fragment was among the items held in the Saxon State Library, in Dresden, which saved a lot of its collection from the Allied bombing raids in 1945.The piece is due to be performed during the service at the Town Church starting at 13:30 GMT.
It will be accompanied by movement choreographed by students from the Performing Arts course at The Guernsey Institute.Tim Wright, head of Guernsey Music Service, said: "To have young people perform this is particularly poignant as it gives us great hope that our younger generations will form a world free from the horrors of the past."
At 13:00 wreaths will be laid at three memorials on the White Rock, which remember the Jewish women who were deported from the island and later died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the Guernsey Eight and the foreign workers brought to the island during the German Occupation in World War Two.The island has held a service on Holocaust Memorial Day since 2005 with this year marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp complex, and the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Bosnia.The Very Reverend Tim Barker, the Dean of Guernsey who is to lead the service, said: "Holocaust Memorial Day is a significant day."It is a day when people of all faiths and none can come together to remember and commit ourselves to building a better world."
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