large Terezín String Orchestra and started to organize cultural and music life in the ghetto. His final performance was for the propaganda film Theresienstadt, directed, under coercion of the camp commandant Karl Rahm, by Kurt Gerron to fool the Red Cross. The film showed Ančerl conducting a work by Pavel Haas on a wooden pavilion, with flowerpots hiding the fact that many of the orchestra were barefoot. The film also featured Martin Roman's big band, the Ghetto Swingers. As soon as the film was over, Gerron, Ančerl, Haas, Roman and all those who had participated in the film were herded into cattle trucks for the final transport to Auschwitz on 15 October 1944. Ančerl managed to survive Auschwitz, but his wife Valy and son Jan (born in Terezín) perished in the gas chambers. From 1946 to 1947 he was a conductor for The State Opera. Later he conducted for Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra until he was appointed artistic director of the Czech Philharmonic on the recommendation of David Oistrakh in 1950. His eighteen-year tenure with this orchestra is often regarded as its greatest period, which brought it much international recognition. In August 1968, after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, he decided to emigrate to Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He conducted his last two concerts with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra at the Prague Spring Festival in 1969. He conducted the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 1968 until his death in Toronto in 1973. His tomb is located in Vyšehrad cemetery in Prague. Some of his notable pupils include Brian Jackson, Štěpán Koníček, Libor Pešek, Jan Tausinger, and Martin Turnovský. Style As a conductor, Ančerl followed a recognizably Czech tradition. Along with Václav Talich, Karel Šejna, Václav Neumann and others, he helped foster a distinctly Czech orchestral sound. Rhythmic sharpness, vibrant dynamics, and a keenly etched sound were hallmarks of his conducting style. While these characteristics were especially evident when he conducted his home orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic, he also persuaded orchestras as diverse as the Toronto Symphony, the Vienna Symphony and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra to play with a distinctive Czech sound. Ancerl's work on the podium brought out the indigenous characteristics of repertoire to which that would apply, and always displayed a flexibly molded and incredibly minute attention to detail. Also remarkable was an innate classical sense to his work in Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms. There was a grace to Ancerl's music-making,