Violins of Hope Page 11

  After reaching Birkenau, Rosé was appointed conductor of the Women’s Camp Orchestra. Because of her stature within the classical music world, she was held in high esteem by the SS guards, who reverentially called her “Frau Alma.” Rosé was able to exploit her exalted status by recruiting Jewish musicians into the orchestra and by making sure that all of her musicians enjoyed special privileges such as permission to shower daily and new uniforms weekly. They also received more food and better accommodations, as well as lenient work assignments. As did Szymon Laks in the men’s camp, Rosé was able to convince the administration of the women’s camp to exempt the orchestral musicians from performing outside during inclement weather.

  Rosé was even able to convince the Nazis to spare her musicians from selections. When mandolin player Rachela Zelmanowicz was in the infirmary with typhus—a death sentence for any other prisoner—Josef Mengele was prepared to send her to the gas chambers.

  “What’s with this one?” he asked during his rounds.

  “She’s from the orchestra.”54

  Mengele continued on his way without any further discussion. As a member of Rosé’s orchestra, Zelmanowicz was untouchable even by him. Her life was spared.

  Given the low percentage of female orchestral musicians in the early twentieth century, it is not surprising that there were fewer professional musicians in the women’s orchestra than in the men’s orchestras of Auschwitz. To compensate for the relatively low levels of ability, Rosé rehearsed her ensemble tirelessly to improve the quality of both their performances and their repertoire. In addition to performing at the camp gate for two or three hours a day, the orchestra rehearsed eight hours a day, six days a week. Rosé knew that the fate of the musicians rested in the reputation of the ensemble.

  Rosé died of mysterious causes on April 4, 1944. After ten months of dedicating herself to protecting all of the women in her orchestra, in the end she was unable to save herself. It is suspected that her death was caused by alcohol poisoning, but it is not clear whether the poisoning was accidental or intentional.

  After Rosé’s death, the orchestra’s repertoire and duties were scaled back and its members were put back to work. The orchestra was dissolved in November 1944, when the non-Jewish members of the orchestra were transferred to the former men’s camp. The Jewish performers were deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

  Other Auschwitz Ensembles

  There were a number of ensembles in Auschwitz in addition to the Main Camp Orchestra and the orchestras of the Birkenau Men’s and Women’s Camps. One was a small ensemble in the subcamp of Birkenau that was established in September 1943 to house transports of Czech Jews from the Theresienstadt concentration camp. This subcamp became known as the “Czech Family Camp,” because the prisoners were allowed to remain with their spouses and children instead of having their family members separated and sent to the Men’s Camp, the Women’s Camp, and the gas chambers.

  As with their counterparts throughout Auschwitz, the men who made up the Czech Family Camp orchestra performed for marches and camp inspections. From time to time, they were also ordered to play during the public beatings of prisoners who had broken minor camp rules or who had been sadistically chosen at random. While the other detainees were forced to watch, the guards would make their victim take off his pants and stick his head into an access hatch on the side of the barracks. The guards would command the orchestra to start playing while they savagely whipped the victim’s bare backside twenty-five to fifty times. On some nights, drunken guards would roar into the camp on their motorcycles. They would make the orchestra play while they drank, sang songs, and dragged young Jewish women off to rape.

  The Czech Family Camp orchestra was disbanded in May 1944, when almost four thousand healthy men and women were sent to other camps. The seven thousand who remained behind were all killed in the gas chambers over two nights in June. After the camp was liquidated, twelve music stands that had been used by its orchestra were reappropriated to the Birkenau Men’s Camp Orchestra, along with a few violins, a trumpet, and a cello. This was the first time that the ensemble in the men’s camp had possessed a cello. They took full advantage of it by forming a string quartet.

  The subcamp of Birkenau that was occupied by Roma in February 1943 had its own ensembles, including a jazz quintet and a band that played popular German songs. The “Gypsy Family Camp” was also home to the notorious laboratory of Josef Mengele, who decided to establish a Gypsy orchestra there after the success of his birthday party. Mengele assigned the task of convening the ensemble to Pery Broad, the SS section leader who regularly played jazz accordion with trumpeter Louis Bannet and other members of the Birkenau Men’s Camp Orchestra. It had been Broad who had brought Louis to Mengele’s birthday party in March 1943. Now Broad assigned Louis to train the Gypsy orchestra, which was composed of thirty Roma playing violins, accordions, mandolins, and guitars.

  “Why should we play for the people who are going to murder us?” a suspicious Romani woman asked Louis at the beginning of the first rehearsal.

  “I do not play for them,” Louis responded. “I play for me.”55

  For the next few weeks, Broad escorted Louis to the Gypsy Family Camp almost every evening to rehearse the ensemble. On the day the orchestra had its debut, Louis found the Roma dressed in colorful costumes. Men swung from high bars and rings, children performed acrobatic tricks, and a woman walked a tightrope that was strung between two gasoline drums. As Louis led the orchestra in a rhapsody, Mengele stood on his laboratory steps watching the Roma sway and spin to the music.

  At the conclusion of the performance, Louis asked Broad whether he would be returning the next day. “That won’t be necessary,” Broad replied.56 The entire camp was sent to the gas chambers that evening.

  After the Gypsy Family Camp was liquidated in August 1944, the Roma were replaced by more transports from Theresienstadt. Just days after the Gypsy orchestra had played for the first and last time, jazz guitarist Heinz “Coco” Schumann and a fellow prisoner picked up the leftover instruments and performed cabaret songs and operetta melodies for their new block elder. Schumann quickly formed a new orchestra with several other arrivals, including the surviving members of the “Ghetto Swingers” big band, which had been popular in Theresienstadt. If they could not find an appropriate instrument for someone, they would give him an instrument he could not play and have him fake his way through the performances. Sometimes a musician’s life depended on his ability to fool the SS officers and guards. “We played music for sheer survival,” explained Schumann. “We made music in hell.”57

  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.”58

  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.”59

  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.

  Legacies of the Auschwitz Orchestras

  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!’”60

  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.”61

  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.”62

  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.”63

  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.”64

  4

  OLE BULL’S VIOLIN

  The Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, ca. 1928. Ernst Glaser is sitting in the concertmaster’s chair, a position he would occupy for an astounding thirty years. (Courtesy of Ernst Simon Glaser.)

  During 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.

  The Nazi Occupation of Norway

  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 Nar
vik 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.