Renan Koen first sat at a piano in Theresienstadt in 2018. For seven years prior, she played compositions written by internees at the hybrid concentration camp and ghetto near Terezin, the Czech fortress town that was occupied by Germans in World War II.
After 2018, she began making annual pilgrimages from Istanbul to this ghostly Czech town to hear its trees whisper between silences before performing lecture concerts from her 2015 album “Holocaust Remembrance / Before Sleep.”