IT may boast one pantomime’s best contemporary scriptwriters and Scotland’s finest 21st century dame, Johnny McKnight, but even in the years when he is not onstage himself, the singular exemplary characteristic of the Christmas show at Stirling’s MacRobert Arts Centre is the top-drawer ensemble work of the theatre’s young performance company. Yet the roots of Macrobert Youth Theatre are some distance from their slick choreography as they belt out Maria Carey’s Yule hit.

The youth company was born in 1995 to work with director John Abulafia’s touring Mecklenburg Opera company on one half of a double-bill of works created over 50 years earlier in Terezin concentration camp near Prague, a transit facility for the death camp at Auschwitz built in the fortified garrison town. Terezin, or Theresienstadt, is now remembered not for the part it played in sending so many Jews to their deaths but for the remarkable flowering of artistic creation that took place there in defiance of the Nazis. Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, Puccini’s Tosca and Strauss’s Die Fledermaus all received performances there. There were concerts of Verdi’s Requiem, and – rather more surprisingly – Haydn’s Creation. Composers held at Terezin included Pavel Haas, now remembered in the name of an acclaimed string quartet which plays his music, and a decade ago Deutsche Grammophon released a fine recital album by Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and violinist Daniel Hope of music written there.

The one-act operas that Mecklenburg staged in 1995 at the MacRobert, and subsequently performed in the Czech Republic – including the Central Scotland youngsters – at the invitation of the Janacek Festival, were entirely created in the camp: Hans Krasa’s Brundibar and Viktor Ullman’s The Emperor of Atlantis. Like Haas, both composers died at Auschwitz and only Brundibar was actually performed at Terezin, its status as a “children’s opera” apparently blinding the Nazis to its clear anti-Hitler theme. The similarly totalitarian story of Ullman’s dark cabaret was banned after the final rehearsal when the Third Reich belatedly woke up to its message, but the scores of both works survived and Brundibar, with its lighter operetta music, is not infrequently revived as a thought-provoking exercise for young performers.

Ullman’s work is musically more profound and something of a rarity – although Opera de Lyon in France has staged it twice in the past five years – but it will be seen in Scotland this month for the first time since those Mecklenburg Opera performances thanks to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS). Students from the Alexander Gibson Opera School are rehearsing with director Caroline Clegg for another intriguing double-bill that pairs The Emperor of Atlantis with Gustav Holst’s Mahabharata-derived Savitri, composed in the middle of the First World War and reckoned to be the first chamber opera in English since the time of Purcell. In both works the title character has to outwit “Death”, present as a figure onstage, and memorably sung by bass baritone Dean Robinson in that Mecklenburg Opera production.

In what is a recurring story in the arts, the company did not survive much beyond the Terezin Operas project, after a huge fundraising effort bringing together commercial sponsorship, charitable trusts and the British Council had underwritten the revival in the Czech Republic. Following another touring double-bill, which also visited the MacRobert and featured Judith Weir’s The Consolations of Scholarship, the board of directors had no option but to cease trading when an expected grant from the Foundation for Sport and the Arts failed to materialise in time.

But as the story of Teresienstadt most eloquently proves, the art itself can always survive, and defy, even the most terrible of circumstances. John Abulafia told The Herald in 1995: “As the opera takes wing, it says: ‘Even if we die in this madness, this world has to end – the mad Emperor cannot last.’” And Viktor Ullman himself wrote: “It must be emphasised that Theresienstadt has served to enhance, not impede, my musical activities. By no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon; our endeavour with respect to art was commensurate with our will to live.”

With appropriate timing, the new RCS production of The Emperor of Atlantis has four performances from Saturday January 20 to Saturday January 27, which is Holocaust Memorial Day and the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army in 1945. On Tuesday of that week, at the University of Glasgow, the 18th Holocaust Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Professor Otto Fred Hutter, the university’s Emeritus Regius Professor of Physiology. Just a month short of his 94th birthday, he will be remembering the “Exodus from Vienna”, having escaped from occupied Austria on the Kindertransport to Britain in 1938.

That the childhood experiences of his generation in war-torn Europe continue to be remembered in performances by young people in Scotland is surely proof, if any is needed, that creativity will always ultimately defeat the most terrible forces of destruction.