Violins of Hope (15 page)

The orchestra in Auschwitz III was established in August 1943. It originally consisted mostly of Polish cavalry musicians, a few Russians, and two Jews. The ensemble was later expanded with the arrival of professional musicians from the Netherlands, Poland, and Greece. As was customary for camp orchestras, the musicians played at the camp gate for the departures and returns of the work details. They also gave concerts for the entertainment of SS officers and guards, especially on holidays like Christmas and Hitler's birthday. On Sunday afternoons or in the evenings, they would play peppy marches during the executions of prisoners who had tried to escape.

During the first few months of the orchestra's existence, the musicians spent eight hours a day copying out music and practicing instead of leaving the camp for work details. Once the ensemble and its repertoire were firmly established, the performers were put back to work. By summer 1944, the musicians were working twelve hours a day in the Buna chemical plant. Even then, they were the last ones to leave in the mornings and the first ones to return at night so they could provide the marching music for the other detainees.

One morning, the musicians were joined in their work detail by a group of young men from the formerly Romanian town of Sighet.

“We work in a warehouse of electrical materials, not far from here,” a Jewish violinist from Warsaw named Juliek explained to one of the new arrivals. “The work is neither difficult nor dangerous.”

“You are lucky, little fellow,” another musician chimed in. “You fell into a good work detail.”
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The “lucky” arrival was a sixteen-year-old boy named Elie Wiesel, who would later become a revered Holocaust memoirist and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

On January 19, 1945, after the survivors of Auschwitz III had been taken on a two-day death march to the Auschwitz subcamp of Gleiwitz, Wiesel found himself on top of Juliek in a packed barrack. Later that night, Juliek extricated himself from the pile of living and dead bodies long enough to play a Beethoven concerto on the instrument he had brought with him from Auschwitz III.

“Never before had I heard such a beautiful sound. In such silence,” Wiesel later recorded. “All I could hear was the violin, and it was as if Juliek's soul had become his bow. He was playing his life. His whole being was gliding over the strings. His unfulfilled hopes. His charred past, his extinguished future. He played that which he would never play again.”
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When Wiesel woke the next morning, he saw Juliek's lifeless face staring back at him. Next to Juliek was his crushed violin—a fitting symbol of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives that had been destroyed in Auschwitz.

The legacies of the Auschwitz orchestras are complicated. Some survivors have asserted that the sounds of the orchestra inspired them to stay alive. “When exhausted in concentration camp Auschwitz by a full day's work, the prisoners came staggering in marching columns, and from afar heard the orchestra playing by the gate—this put them back on their feet. It gave them the courage and the additional strength to survive,” recalled one survivor. “We could clearly hear how our colleague musicians spoke to us in masterly fashion on their instruments . . . ‘Don't give up, brothers! Not all of us will perish!'”
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But many prisoners resented the orchestras. The members of the Birkenau Men's Camp Orchestra saw this when they played in the women's hospital and in the crematorium. Holocaust memoirist Primo Levi wrote of similar reactions he experienced while convalescing in the Auschwitz III infirmary. “One cannot hear the music well from the infirmary. The beating of the big drums and the cymbals reach us continuously and monotonously, but on this weft the musical phrases weave a pattern only intermittently, according to the caprices of the wind. We all look at each other from our beds, because we all feel that this music is infernal,” he wrote. “The tunes are few, a dozen, the same ones every day, morning and evening: marches and popular songs dear to every German. They lie engraven on our minds and will be the last thing in camp that we shall forget: they are the voice of the camp, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards.”
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For the musicians who played in the orchestras, music often provided a welcome escape from thoughts that were otherwise filled with despair and death. “For all of us in the orchestra it was our music making that served as our most important life preserver and stimulant during this period,” documented a former member of the Auschwitz III orchestra. “We derived so much satisfaction and joy from performing in concert that we found ourselves forgetting for a moment that we were condemned souls living in a hell that the uninitiated could never even imagine.”
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Music offered the performers opportunities to live a little longer, if only for one more day. While participation in an orchestra did not guarantee survival, it did protect musicians from the harshest of labor assignments and sometimes offered warmer uniforms and slightly better food. In many cases, these advantages offered just enough benefits to allow musicians to outlive the Nazi regime. “Music has kept me alive,” Henry Meyer later confirmed. “There is no doubt about it.”
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Some of the musicians who played in the Auschwitz orchestras continued to make music after the Holocaust. Henry moved to the United States and became a founding member of the world-famous LaSalle Quartet. Szymon returned to Paris and resumed his career as a composer. Jacques also went back to France, but he later immigrated to Israel, where he ultimately passed his violin down to his granddaughter.

But many of the musicians never played again. Survivor's guilt, combined with deep regret over having been forced to exploit their art to save their lives, rendered making music too painful.

One former Auschwitz musician sold his instrument to Holocaust survivor Abraham Davidovitz. Abraham was from Tiraspol, in the Romanian region of Bessarabia (now in Moldova). In 1939 he became one of the million Eastern European Jews who escaped Nazi oppression by fleeing to Central Asia. He was imprisoned in Uzbekistan for more than three years, during which time his wife Manya fed herself and their young son Freddy by working in a bakery. After the war, a bureaucrat who mistakenly thought that Tiraspol was in Poland allowed Abraham and his family to return to Europe with repatriated Polish Jews.

In 1946, Abraham was working near Munich with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to assist other Holocaust refugees. An impoverished Auschwitz survivor approached him holding a violin. The survivor told Abraham that he had played in an orchestra in the concentration camp and that the violin had saved his life. Now he wanted to sell the violin. He needed the money, and had no interest in ever playing the instrument again. Abraham, who had already been thinking about encouraging Freddy to play, purchased the violin for fifty dollars, a respectable amount of money at the time. Abraham gave the violin to his son, but unfortunately never told him the name of its original owner.

Abraham immigrated to Israel in 1949 with Manya, Freddy, and his new twins, Devorah and Shmuel. They brought with them the violin, which Freddy had already stopped playing.

By 2009, it was time to do something with the instrument, which had been neglected for sixty-five years. They refused to sell it, insisting, “For us, this is a memory of our parents, and a memory of all the Holocaust.” The Davidovitz brothers considered donating the instrument to Yad Vashem—Israel's Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. They ultimately decided that it belonged not in a museum but on the stage. They brought the instrument to Amnon for restoration and donated it to the virtuoso Shlomo Mintz so that he could play the violin all over the world in the memory of everyone who suffered during the Holocaust. As Freddy explained, “It will go on playing after me and, I hope, for many generations.”
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D
uring the 1940–41 concert season, the Norwegian city of Bergen was celebrating the 175th anniversary of the founding of its orchestra. The Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra was instituted in 1765—a date that establishes the city as the home to one of the oldest orchestras in the world. During one point in its proud heritage, the ensemble's music director was none other than the renowned Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, one of Bergen's most famous native sons.

The highlight of the Bergen Philharmonic's 175th season was to be an appearance by Ernst Glaser, the concertmaster of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra and the country's most prominent musician. Anticipation was especially high because Ernst was going to be performing on a valuable Guarneri del Gesù violin that had once been owned by the celebrated nineteenth-century Norwegian virtuoso Ole Bull—another international figure from Bergen.

But after Nazi youth staged a riot to protest Ernst's plans to perform on the national treasure, his appearance in German-occupied Bergen was canceled in the middle of the concert.

Norway declared its neutrality on May 27, 1938, and reaffirmed this position on September 1, 1939. But by April 1940, it was clear that the country would soon be occupied by either Germany or Great Britain. Germany wanted access to Norway's naval and air bases, as well as to the northern port of Narvik for the continued transport of crucial iron ore from neutral Sweden. England wanted to block Germany from having that very same access.

Germany struck first and won a decisive victory. Moving swiftly by air and sea, German forces invaded Norway early in the morning on April 9, 1940. Norwegian cities from the southern coast to the Arctic Circle—including Bergen and Narvik—were occupied within hours. By that afternoon, German troops were marching unchallenged down Oslo's main thoroughfare. Although fighting continued elsewhere in the country for two months, the Norwegian forces were poorly equipped, badly outnumbered, and grossly underprepared. They had no choice but to surrender and did so on June 10, 1940. The German conquest had taken longer than it had in other countries, but it was now complete.

In their mission to Nazify Norway, German leaders found a ready collaborator in Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian politician whose last name has since become synonymous with opportunistic traitors. In 1933, Quisling had founded the National Union, Norway's Nazi Party. Within two years, Quisling had started accusing Jews of engendering world communism by controlling monetary systems and presses. There were only around 1,600 Jews living in Norway at the time. Although this was less than 0.1 percent of the population, Quisling had asserted that they had secured influential positions as part of an international conspiracy to destroy the country.

Bolstered by the rise of Nazism in Germany, Quisling had ramped up his vitriolic anti-Semitism with each passing year. His goal was to create a “New Norway” in the mold of Hitler's Third Reich, using any means necessary to preserve what he saw as the purity of the Nordic race. To assist him with propagating anti-Semitism and persecuting Jews, Quisling had even created his own paramilitary force. Modeled after Nazi Germany's infamous Brownshirts, the “Hird” took its name from legendary Norse warriors.

After the German invasion, Quisling was named acting prime minister and ultimately minister-president of Norway. With the blessings of the occupying German authorities with whom he shared power, Quisling and the Norwegian state police quickly introduced a number of measures intended to ostracize and eventually eliminate Norway's already small Jewish population. In May 1940, the police confiscated radios belonging to Jewish families. In addition to preventing Jews from listening to foreign broadcasts, this measure marked the first efforts to identify Norwegian Jews and rob them of the legal rights afforded to other Norwegians. The process of registering Jews was expanded that fall, when the Nazis demanded and received lists of the Jewish residents of Oslo and Trondheim, which were the two largest Jewish communities in Norway.

The Norwegian Nazis instigated a campaign of harassment against the newly identified Jews. They smashed the windows of stores that were owned by Jews, or painted over them with anti-Semitic slogans such as “Jewish Parasites!” and “Jews not tolerated in Norway.”
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A number of Jewish doctors were deprived of their medical licenses and therefore of their right to work.

There was also an attempt to dismiss Jewish musicians from their positions. Edvard Sylou-Creutz, who was named a co-director of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation after the Nazis took power, announced that all music by Jewish composers should be banned and that all performers should be required to be members of the National Union Party. Shortly thereafter, composer and prominent music critic Per Reidarson proposed a Union of Norwegian Artists and Journalists. Modeled after the Reich Culture Chamber, Reidarson's Union would have excluded all Jewish artists from their professions.