"The Music of Terezin" at 92nd Street Y Russell Ryan, on piano, and Wolfgang Holzmair of the Nash Ensemble in The Music of Terezin at the 92nd Street Y. Over the last couple of decades, musicians have been reconstructing the legacy of composers who spent World War II in Terezin (also known by its German name, Theresienstadt), a garrison city near Prague that the Nazis turned into a concentration camp. About 140,000 Jews were sent there, starting in 1941, including an unusually large number of musicians, writers and painters. The Nazis allowed these artists to create a cultural life and turned it into a propaganda tool. Terezin, as they presented it to visitors from the Red Cross, was a model camp: musicians gave concerts; children painted pictures and wrote poems. But behind that facade, Terezin's inmates were used as slave labor in local mines and factories, and most - some 88,000 - were eventually sent to Auschwitz and other death camps. The 92nd Street Y's Will to Create, Will to Live: The Culture of Terezin, which opened on Tuesday evening, is an expansive monthlong series devoted to the camp, with concerts by the Nash Ensemble, the baritone Wolfgang Holzmair and the pianists Russell Ryan and Shai Wosner. It also includes panel discussions, readings, children's programs, a film screening and an exhibition of posters, photographs, art and artifacts. If not for its subject matter, you would call it a festival. A hierarchy of sorts has emerged among the composers of Terezin, and the first two concerts, on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, helped clarify it. In some ways the brightest star was Viktor Ullmann, whose searing operatic Hitler satire, "The Emperor of Atlantis," is staged somewhere every few seasons. Ullmann was represented by a pair of grimly picturesque songs and the turbulent, virtuosic String Quartet No. 3 (1943), all works in which beauty mingles disconcertingly with bitterness. Hans Krasa shines brightly in this firmament as well. His children's opera, "Brundibar" (1938), though composed before he went to Terezin, was performed at the camp 55 times. The Nash players offered a cheerful 15-minute suite, arranged by David Matthews, that conveyed something of the work's hopefulness. But they captured Krasa's darker side, too, in a resigned Passacaglia and Fugue (1944) and a furiously acidic "Tanec" ("Dance," 1943 or 1944). The complexities of Gideon Klein's String Trio (1944), which opened the Tuesday concert, are more emotional than musical. Klein's fast outer movements are full of vibrant rhythms and wild touches that give the piece an almost defiant sound, yet its central slow movement - variations on a plaintive Moravian folk tune - is gritty and brooding, with glancing references to themes from Verdi's Requiem and Mahler's "Kindertotenlieder." You could wonder, at times, whether you were reading more into the instrumental works than the composers had intended, although the Nash Ensemble's forceful, sharp-edged performances certainly encouraged such speculation. The vocal works, by their nature, are another matter. There were policy debates: Adolf Strauss, in "Heimweh" ("Homesickness"), argued that "we need a land of our own/to make an end of distress and pain," while Carlo Sigmund Taube, in "Ein Jüdisches Kind" ("A Jewish Child"), wrote that "as long as you are not filled by the word "homeland," your heart will stay unfettered." But mostly these are songs of barely disguised pain and a longing for freedom and normalcy. Mr. Holzmair gave them all subtly shaped, powerful readings. But he was at his most affecting in a group of undated songs by Ilse Weber, an author of children's books and an amateur composer who wrote with disarming directness. Her "Guten Tag," the first and possibly the earliest song, was a sweetly innocent plea for a good day and God's blessings, but the group darkened from there. In "Emigrantenlied" ("Emigrant's Song"), she hopes for a day when "discord, hate and greed will pass away." But in the final song, "Ich Wandre Durch Theresienstadt" ("I Wander Through Terezin"), she looks despondently across the valley, realizes that the notion of having a home has become strange to her and wonders: "When will our suffering end? When shall we again be free? Not all the music in the programs was written at Terezin or by its prisoners. A piano four-hand arrangement of Smetana's lively "Bartered Bride" Overture, and Suk's "Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn, "St. Wenceslas," " in the first two programs, and works by Janacek, Mahler and Debussy in coming ones, are believed to have been performed at the camp. They provide perspective and round out our view of Terezin's musical life. But they also put the suffering implicit in the music composed there in stark relief. Not that the comparisons were necessary. The remaining concerts in The Music of Terezin are on Saturday and Monday evenings; the full series Will to Create, Will to Live: The Culture of Terezin runs through Feb. 16 at the 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue; (212) 415-5500, 92y.org.