Violins of Hope Page 16

  By the time the convoy reached the Dniester River, the rain that had been falling nonstop since they had reached Ataki was causing the river to overflow. The Romanian soldiers decided to postpone the river crossing until the next day. Feivel and his family lit a fire that once again allowed them to enjoy warm sugar water. They slept as a group, with the men forming a perimeter to protect the women from the marauding Romanian soldiers. They covered themselves as best as they could, but it was impossible to ward off the wind and rain. They spent yet another restless night, frozen, hungry, exhausted, and terrified.

  The next morning, wooden rafts arrived to ferry the Jews across the river. The deportees crowded onto the decrepit rafts, which were barely able to support their weight. Some overturned, leaving dozens of bodies floating in the freezing river. Shouting and cursing, the Romanian soldiers continued to shove the Jews onto the rafts with their rifle butts. Before long, they started pushing deportees into the water, mockingly wondering aloud whether the Dniester River would part for the Jews like the Red Sea had for their ancestors. The first people to be thrown in the water were the rabbi from Gura Humorului and his six children. Unable to swim, they screamed and flailed in the river for a few seconds before they all disappeared into the current. Feivel watched as the soldiers stood there, clapping their hands and laughing.

  The Winingers made it across the river, but a Romanian soldier stole one of their last suitcases along the way. They were herded down yet another muddy road to the town of Mogilev-Podolski, the first stop on what would become a lengthy death march deeper into Transnistria for forty thousand Jews.

  Harry Löbel

  One family that was allowed to stay in Mogilev-Podolski was that of a young violinist named Harry Löbel. Harry started playing the violin at the age of five and was already performing with the local symphony orchestra in Czernowitz when he was nine. By the time the Löbels reached Transnistria, they had lost all of their possessions except for the small violin that young Harry carried on his back. Knowing that his family would die of starvation and exhaustion if they were forced to march farther into Transnistria, Harry’s father convinced the commandant of the Mogilev-Podolski transit camp to allow the family to stay there.

  Harry’s violin playing saved him and his family from starvation during their three-year detainment in Mogilev-Podolski. When the commandant, who was an amateur pianist, heard that Harry played the violin, he summoned the boy to perform. The commandant was moved to tears by Harry’s playing. He decided that the boy and his family deserved special treatment. He ordered that they be given extra food and that Harry be allowed to take lessons from a teacher from another camp. The commandant followed Harry’s progress, summoning the boy to play for him once a month.

  In March 1944, Harry was again rescued by the violin. A member of a Romanian delegation charged with caring for war orphans visited Mogilev-Podolski. She heard Harry play and was so captivated by his talent that she issued him a special permit to leave Transnistria, even though she knew his parents were alive. Harry traveled to Bucharest and was then sent to Palestine, where his parents joined him one year later. Harry’s child-sized violin also survived the Holocaust. It was later sold to purchase a new instrument that was more suitable for a professional adult.

  After the Holocaust, Harry Löbel changed his name from German to Hebrew, choosing the Hebrew form of Abraham for his given name and Melamed, a word for a yeshiva teacher, as his surname. Avraham Melamed joined the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra as a member of the first violin section, and was with the ensemble when they traveled to Auschwitz in 1988. En route to the death camp, Melamed was so overcome with emotion that he was unable to say a word. So he let his violin speak for him. He took it out of its case and played the “Kaddish” movement from Maurice Ravel’s Two Hebrew Melodies. As he played, tears came to his eyes, as well as to those of his fellow orchestra members. During the same tour, the ensemble performed a historic concert in Berlin, ending with “Hatikvah.” It was one of the most emotional performances of Melamed’s distinguished career.

  Death March to Obukhov

  Unlike the Löbels, the Wininger family did not stop in Mogilev-Podolski. Instead, they were forced to continue walking seven miles eastward to an abandoned military school in Scazinetz. The thousands of Jews who greeted them looked like walking corpses. Their feet were bare, their clothes were in tatters, and their bodies were covered with flea bites. Feivel spotted an old friend from Czernowitz. He, too, was emaciated, filthy, and flea-ridden.

  The soldiers shoved the convoy into a large garrison that was already crowded with thousands of people. The looks of despair on people’s faces and the stench of human waste were overwhelming, as was the earsplitting din of cries and screams. Some of the deportees had gone insane during their journey from Romania. Feivel watched in horror as a mother cradled an empty blanket, singing, laughing, and crying as if her dead baby were still there.

  For the first time, Feivel started to fully process the gravity of his situation. In Gura Humorului, on the train, and in Ataki, he had been too shocked to truly grasp what was happening. At the Dniester River, he had been too focused on mere survival to give any thought to the future. Now that he was finally at a standstill, reality started to sink in. He pressed his fingernails into the palms of his hands and quietly braced himself for the challenges ahead.

  A group of Romanian soldiers entered the hall and ordered some of the younger deportees to remove the gray corpses that littered the barracks floor. When the soldiers returned early the next morning, more bodies of men, women, and children lay lifelessly on the cold floor. Another crew of young men was conscripted to dig a large trench near the camp fence, load the bodies into a cart, and dump the corpses into the mass grave.

  The Jews were once again jostled, cursed at, and struck with rifle butts as they were ordered to line up in rows. Miserable and confused, with tattered and foul-smelling clothes, they formed their lines and renewed their death march.

  The soft mud continued to make walking very difficult. Several deportees got their shoes stuck in the mud. They had no choice but to leave their shoes in the slime to avoid being beaten or shot for slowing down. This only prolonged their deaths, as they were now even more exposed to the harsh elements of the nonstop rain and snow. Before too long, the soldiers started to push the soaked and exhausted Jews along. With increasing frequency, Feivel heard shots ring out as the soldiers opened fire on the deportees who were moving too slowly. The bodies of those who were killed were simply left on the roadside.

  Early into the first day, Feivel could see that Tzici was losing her strength. She kept changing the arm with which she was carrying Helen. She needed Feivel’s brother-in-law to push her from behind to keep moving forward. Feivel could not help her because he was too busy propping up his mother, who would have collapsed into the mud without his assistance. Feivel opened his last remaining suitcase and gave more of his rapidly dwindling possessions to a soldier in exchange for allowing his ailing mother and baby Helen to ride in one of the two horse-drawn carriages that followed the procession. On the second day, Feivel exchanged more of his belongings for a ride for his mother, but received a whip to the face for asking if Helen could also sit in the wagon. Instead, Feivel created a sling for Helen by cutting a slit across the back of Tzici’s jacket and adding a rope to support the baby’s weight. Helen had continued to grow thinner and weaker. Hungry and freezing, she had even lost the strength to cry.

  Feivel watched as others were forced to abandon their parents, spouses, and children who were too weak to walk any further. One morning, Feivel overheard a daughter arguing with her elderly mother over the impossible decision of whether to remain in the barn and die with her or leave her behind when the death march continued. The sadistic soldiers ended the debate by shooting both of them. Another mother abandoned her young daughter on the side of the road when she was no longer able to carry her. A few hours later, the remorseful mother simply stopped walking. She off
ered no resistance when a soldier beat and shot her for not keeping up with the rest of the convoy.

  At night, the Jews were locked in barns. Feivel would look around and see how their numbers had dwindled during the day. When he woke the next morning, Feivel would count the numbers of deportees who had died overnight. This included his uncle, who died during the first night of the death march from Scazinetz. The soldiers would add to the numbers by shooting the children and sick people who were too weak to continue walking.

  After three days of a brutal death march through the rain and snow, the convoy arrived at an abandoned train station in Obukhov. By this time, only half of the Jews who had left Scazinetz remained. The soldiers warned them to not leave the train station. They turned around their wagons and drove off, leaving the deportees with neither food nor any other supplies. Although the Jews had been strictly forbidden from traveling to the nearby village, many went there to beg, to exchange their belongings for food, or to find jobs. More often than not, the Ukrainians welcomed them by throwing rocks or siccing dogs on them.

  Feivel’s mother had grown very sick. She had suffered from heart problems before the deportation, and had contracted pneumonia during the death march. A doctor from Gura Humorului visited her in the train station and told her that she would not last much longer. She died in her sleep that night.

  The Shargorod Ghetto

  Feivel decided to take his remaining family members to Shargorod, a larger city where there was already an established Jewish ghetto. Because the large Jewish community had been able to organize itself, Shargorod promised better prospects for food and employment. Shargorod was also in the district of Mogilev, a region that saw less German involvement and Romanian cruelty than other parts of Transnistria.

  Since they could have been sentenced to death for trying to relocate themselves, Feivel’s family hired a carriage driver to take them overnight to avoid detection. The trip cost the Winingers a gold earring—their last valuable item.

  The Shargorod Ghetto was packed with seven thousand deportees who were squeezed into 337 schools, community buildings, homes, cellars, and attics. Feivel was able to rent a single room from a Ukrainian peasant that became home to his family and another family—seventeen people in all. Feivel found a job cutting down trees, for which he was paid a quarter of a loaf of stale and moldy bread daily. This was not nearly enough to feed his family. Feivel gave the bread he earned to his father, Tzici, and Helen. He sustained himself by eating snow and leftovers that he foraged from the garbage.

  If they were to have any chance of procuring enough food and firewood to stay alive in the freezing ghetto, Feivel and his family knew they would have to risk their lives by engaging in illegal activities. Tzici earned food from their Ukrainian landlord by disguising herself in his wife’s clothes and traveling by train throughout Transnistria selling his sausages. Had she been caught smuggling food or simply roaming around without a permit, she would have been tortured and killed as a warning to other Jews. Feivel stole wood from his job to keep his family warm and to heat drinking water during the deadly Romanian winter. He, too, would have been shot on the spot had he been discovered.

  Thousands of Jews died during that first winter in Transnistria from starvation and exposure, as well as from dysentery and other illnesses. An untreated typhus epidemic ran rampant throughout the cramped, unsanitary, and lice-infested Transnistrian ghettos, claiming 1,449 lives in Shargorod alone in just a few months. The bodies of the dead were simply left in the street, where other ghetto residents would strip them of whatever precious clothing they had left. Once or twice a day, a group of deportees would roam the streets on a horse-drawn carriage, picking up the cadavers and taking them to the cemetery. Sometimes the makeshift undertakers would light bonfires to thaw the icy ground enough to dig mass graves. Other times, the corpses would simply be added to piles of other frozen bodies. When the spring came, the deportees hacked the frozen bodies apart with axes to separate them from each other for burial.

  The Amati

  It did not take long for Feivel to find a way to protect his family from starvation and exposure—one that did not put their lives at risk but involved playing the violin.

  Ten days after Feivel arrived in Shargorod, a man paid him a visit. Feivel barely recognized him as Judge Robinson. As the chief justice of Gura Humorului, Judge Robinson had once been a tall, elegantly dressed man of great distinction in both the Jewish and gentile communities. Now the judge was stooped, emaciated, and wearing a dirty, shabby suit. He approached Feivel extending a trembling hand that was dried and blistered. In his other hand, he carried a violin case.

  “Please be seated, Mr. Robinson,” Feivel said, quickly adding, “Your Honor.”

  The judge sheepishly smiled a toothless grin and sat down.

  “I live nearby with my two sisters,” the judge started. “I am too weak and too old for the jobs here. We have no food, nor wood.” Then he stopped. “Could I please have some warm water?” he asked.

  Feivel gave him warm sugar water.

  The judge took just a few sips and said, “I will bring the glass back later. The rest is for my sisters.” He rose to leave.

  “Drink the whole glass,” Feivel urged him. “We will give you more water and sugar for your sisters.”

  The judge sat back down and relaxed. He closed his eyes and drank very slowly. When he had gathered his strength, he finally got to the point of his unexpected visit.

  “I know that you are a musician,” he said. “I also played once, when my hands still worked. You are young and will be able to play for many years.”

  The judge opened the case and took out an Amati—an instrument crafted by one of the most respected names in violinmaking. It was Nicolò Amati who had taught Andrea Guarneri, the patriarch of the Guarneri dynasty and the grandfather of the man who made Ole Bull’s Violin. Nicolò may have also been Antonio Stradivari’s teacher.

  Feivel’s hands shook as the judge handed him the expensive instrument. He could not even remember how long it had been since he had played a violin.

  “Take it,” the judge insisted. “What good is a violin if I have no food? If you’re able to earn a little something from making music, then don’t forget me.”

  The judge left as quickly as he had appeared. Feivel had not even had the time to react. He was too stunned by the gift to do anything but put the violin back in its case and set it aside.

  Music had played a large role in Feivel’s life for as long as he could remember. As a little boy, he heard a violin being played at a wedding and decided then and there that he wanted to play the instrument. In the absence of a violin, he would escape to the forest as often as possible to listen to the birdcalls that he thought sounded like one. Once, while bringing his father his lunch, Feivel heard a violin playing through an open window. He sat underneath that window, listening intently until the violinist chased him away.

  When Feivel was nine years old, his mother brought home a violin for him. His first lessons were with an elderly teacher who had a habit of falling asleep during his sessions, so Feivel taught himself to play by practicing for hours. When Feivel was ten, he proudly earned his first salary by playing principal violin in an orchestra that accompanied silent films. As a teenager, he bicycled to Hungary with a mandolin-playing friend for six weeks, playing concerts along the way to earn money. He also learned to play viola and cello, and enjoyed many happy evenings making music with his friends. For a short while, he even formed a jazz band consisting of a piano, guitar, saxophone, and violin that played in the spa and ski resort town of Vatra Dornei—until his mother found out and dragged him home.

  When Feivel was drafted into the Romanian army, the violin shielded him from basic training. Upon learning that Feivel was a musician, an officer summoned him for an impromptu performance. The officer was so impressed that he invited Feivel to sleep at his house instead of in the barracks with the other recruits. While his comrades were training on the rifle
range, Feivel enjoyed easy duty entertaining the officers. Even during his yearlong military service in Bucharest, Feivel was adopted by a lieutenant who would invite him to his house on the weekends to play duets with his pianist daughter.

  Although music continued to play an integral role in Feivel’s daily life, he never dreamed of attending a conservatory and launching a musical career. Instead, he worked as an accountant and then as the cafeteria manager for a large silk factory in Bucharest. After he and his family were forced to move to Gura Humorului, he managed the nearby sawmill before he was fired for being Jewish. Now, in Transnistria, music would become not just a profession for Feivel, but a means to spare his family and friends from almost certain death.

  The day after the judge’s visit, Feivel returned home from his job chopping wood and decided that it was time to try out the violin. He nervously removed the instrument from its case, placed it against his neck, and drew the bow lightly across the strings. He was instantly enchanted by the sound. He had never heard such a beautiful instrument.

  He closed his eyes and started playing. The music transported him to a different place, to a different time. He was no longer in the ghetto. He was not hungry, he was not soaking wet, and he was not wearing shabby rags. He was the richest man in the world.

  When Feivel stopped playing, he opened his eyes. Everyone in the room was staring at him in amazement. Several fellow deportees from the street had entered the room to hear him play. People who were hungry, sick, and infested with lice simply stood there with smiles on their faces. They, too, had been carried away by his violin playing.

  Feivel’s Ukrainian landlord appeared and shooed away all of the strangers. “You really play nicely,” he said. “Do you know how to play Ukrainian music? I could recommend you to play at a wedding.”