 Why is this important? Why is poetry important? Why are the arts important? Well, maybe they're not just pretty frills or an escape. We indulge in on the margin of our real lives. They can be crucial, in fact, to us in living day to day. They can actually help us survive. And I was reminded of this fact when I watched a film last night on TV. Some of you may have seen this. It was called Defiant Requiem. Anybody here see that? It told the story of how during World War II, Jewish inmates in the camp ghetto of terrorism near Prague got together and memorized the Latin words of the Verdi Requiem and performed it, accompanied by one single piano, many times over in a period of about three years. The words of the Requiem became completely transformed, especially the liberame, liberame meaning free me, took on, as you can imagine, a very special meaning and enabled the prisoner singers to create something in their own space and to fight for life in the atmosphere of death. Their defiance came out in the section Die Eire, The Wrath of God. That is, The Wrath of God would be visited on those that hurt them. This was a risky thing for the prisoners to sing in front of the Nazis because it was a song of resistance and showed their success in taking possession of their own world. So I would like to read my poem dedicated to a woman prisoner in Germany during the same war. She was in Bergenau, that's the woman's camp in Archwit. She would allow to play the violin in an old woman orchestra. Ultimately she actually survived and sang on the radio at the liberation of France. So I wrote a poem to this woman. Her name is Fania Fenelon and it's called Playing for Time. I know I cannot imagine it. Not the filing faceless ones, father and sister, not the charred cadavers, not the total loss of feeling, almost total. Yet the lying of the instruments, the deceit of the strings, the duplicitous human voice, those I can imagine, ars lustrous illusion with its fearful contradictions, the beauty of the lone nightingale song, the madness of the dawn chorus in the midst of chaos. For what is it that sustains and feeds me now? The cracked bell of her voice over the airwaves. Thank you.