Violins of Hope Page 8
The refugees quickly fell into a predictable daily routine. They would rise at 7 a.m. to drink their morning tea and receive their daily ration of bread, margarine, and sugar. Lunch took place between 12:30 and 1 p.m., and often consisted of fresh meat, corned beef, or canned salmon, along with unfamiliar local ingredients such as sweet potatoes, dried beans, and breadfruit. At 7 p.m., the refugees would eat soup and jam for dinner. Between their meals, the Jews under the age of thirty-five would do light chores such as cooking, cleaning, gardening, and maintenance. It was not long before craftsmen opened workshops that provided their fellow refugees with essential items such as clothes, shoes, and custom-made furniture for their barracks. Eventually, the detainees even earned small allowances for their chores and wares, many of which were sold in Mauritius and abroad.
In their free time, the refugees engaged in a wide variety of educational, cultural, and social activities. They founded a school, where the children were taught English, German, Hebrew, religion, geography, history, mathematics, science, music, and art. The adults organized similar classes for themselves, and also studied Jewish history and Zionism. They read the local newspapers, as well as books and magazines that they received from the Mauritian police department and Jewish communities in Palestine and South Africa. They held literary and poetry competitions, as well as tournaments for cards and chess. For a while, they even published a daily newsletter, Camp News. Artists organized exhibitions, and playwrights and actors staged theatrical performances, puppet shows, children’s plays, and musical revues. There were also dances, cabaret evenings, and Hanukkah parties. Such events helped to provide comfort and raise the morale of the detainees throughout their prolonged internment.
Not surprisingly, music played a major role in this vibrant cultural community. In February 1941, the residents of Mauritius donated pianos, violins, accordions, and other instruments to the refugees. Erich, of course, still had the violin that he had brought from Vienna. The musicians in the camp entertained themselves and their fellow detainees by transcribing Beethoven piano sonatas and performing them as string quartets. They repaid the generosity of their Mauritian benefactors by forming an orchestra that accompanied an amateur performance of Puccini’s opera La Bohème in nearby Rose Hill that July. Twelve hundred detainees attended one of the performances. It was the first time many of them left the confines of the Beau Bassin Prison.
Erich and other refugee musicians regularly performed in the Beau Bassin Boys, a jazz orchestra formed by pianist and fellow detainee Fritz “Papa” Haas. In their first year in Mauritius, the Beau Bassin Boys provided the music for an English-language revue that consisted of songs, folk dances, and satirical poems about camp life. The vaudeville show was a big hit among those in attendance, which included the British commander of the camp and his wife, as well as members of the press. The Beau Bassin Boys were so popular in the prison camp that Papa Haas is often the first name that survivors recall when discussing their lives in Mauritius.
The popularity of the Beau Bassin Boys extended well beyond the prison walls. Their performances were broadcast over the radio and they were even allowed to leave the prison several times a week for performances. Dressed in matching white shirts and black pants, black bow ties with red cummerbunds, and white dinner jackets, the Beau Bassin Boys played at dances, weddings, and other official and festive events throughout Mauritius, including parties hosted by the island’s governor. These performances gave the musicians their only moments of freedom. The frequent invitations to play elsewhere on the island provided precious opportunities to leave the Beau Bassin Prison.
When they first arrived in Mauritius, the Jews were not allowed to pass through the heavily guarded iron gate that separated the men from the women and children. These restrictions were gradually relaxed. Within the first year, married women were permitted to bring their children to visit their husbands during limited hours. Then all refugees were given the opportunity to intermingle for four hours a day in the recreation grounds that surrounded the prison. By the time the detainees finally left Mauritius in 1945, they were able to move freely between the men’s prison and the women’s camp.
Once the refugees were no longer separated by gender, old relationships were rekindled and new ones began. The September 13, 1942, issue of Camp News teasingly reported that Erich had “succumbed to family life” by marrying Ruth Rosenthal,34 whose family had left Danzig with financial assistance from relatives in the United States. The Beau Bassin Boys provided the music for Erich’s wedding, which was one of thirty marriages that took place in the prison courtyard by the end of 1942. One year later, Erich’s son Ze’ev became one of sixty Jewish children who were born in Mauritius.
Although Beau Bassin was nothing like a Nazi concentration camp, life within the prison was still dreary. Throughout their lengthy internment, the refugees yearned for freedom. They resented being sequestered behind prison walls, under the watchful eyes of a hundred members of the prison administration, staff, and guards. They felt oppressed by the limited opportunities to leave the camp. Worst of all was their frustration over having been stripped of their civil rights and incarcerated for an indefinite period of time with no opportunities to defend themselves or appeal their confinement through any legal system.
The refugees also continued to suffer from malaria. At some points during their detention, as many as 40 to 50 percent of them had the disease. While malaria was not the primary cause of many deaths, its chronic high fevers did fatally weaken the elderly and those with heart conditions. Lacking adequate medical care to deal with malaria and other illnesses such as malnutrition, dysentery, and cardiovascular diseases, 127 Jewish refugees died in Mauritius. This included Erich’s father-in-law, who died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-five.
It was not until January 1945—four years after the refugees had been brought to Mauritius—that the British government finally changed its mind about their immigration to Palestine. Bowing at last to international pressure, Great Britain decided to include the Mauritian detainees in the 10,300 emigrants who would be admitted into Palestine that year.
Given the difficulties of traveling during the war—several ships had been torpedoed near Mauritius—the British could not pledge that the relocation would be swift. In the end, eight months would transpire between when the British decided to send the refugees back to Palestine and when they were actually able to fulfill that promise. One plan was to give the Jews passage aboard a convoy of warships that would be passing through Mauritius in May. This was abandoned when a polio epidemic broke out on the island. The refugees were quarantined and their departure was canceled.
They would not get under way until August 11, 1945. By this time, World War II had ended and the Jews had learned of the horrible genocide that had claimed the lives of countless relatives and friends they had left behind in Europe. Out of the 1,581 Jewish refugees who had been on board the Atlantic, 1,307 were still living on Mauritius in 1945. In addition to those who had died, several dozen emigrants had left to fight in the war. The remaining refugees joined several hundred British soldiers who were returning from India aboard the RMS Franconia.
Israel
On August 26, 1945, almost six years after leaving Vienna for Palestine, the refugees returned to Haifa. This time they would bypass Atlit and proceed directly to their predetermined housing arrangements. Some would stay with family members who were already in Palestine or would settle into one of the collective agricultural communities. About four hundred of them would move into houses that had been built for them in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and the northern coastal city of Nahariya. A few dozen who had opted to return to Europe were taken to a transit camp south of Gaza.
Erich was among the immigrants who settled in Nahariya. He renewed his career as a butcher, but still continued to play the violin that had accompanied him on his astonishing odyssey from Vienna to Dachau and Buchenwald, from Bratislava to Palestine and then Mauritius, and finally back to Palestine. H
e would often invite a pianist and a drummer he had met in Nahariya over to his home for intimate evenings of playing traditional Austrian folk music and waltzes.
Erich returned to Austria a few times for brief visits. He gave serious consideration to murdering the former friend who had informed on his father, but was talked out of it. “Don’t do it,” Erich’s friends pleaded with him. “They’ll throw you in jail for the rest of your life. You’ve already spent enough time in prison.”35
Erich died in 1988, at the age of seventy-six. His violin was passed down to his son Ze’ev, who lived in Germany, and his daughter Tova, who still lived in Israel. It stayed with Tova until 2012, when she started considering selling it. Her son took the violin to Tel Aviv to see how much the instrument was worth. He quickly learned that there was only one person who could appraise it: Amnon Weinstein. The violin was damaged from being played outside in Mauritius’s tropical heat and had little monetary value, but Amnon immediately recognized the instrument’s historical significance. He agreed to restore the violin for free. All he asked in return was permission to maintain Erich Weininger’s Violin as one of the Violins of Hope.
3
THE AUSCHWITZ VIOLIN
An SS photograph of the Auschwitz Main Camp Orchestra in the spring of 1941. (From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of the Institute of National Remembrance, Poland.)
Günther and Rosemarie Goldschmidt, the performers who founded the Palestine Orchestra, and Erich Weininger were among the last Jews to leave Nazi Germany. The country sealed its borders on October 23, 1941, prohibiting any other Jews from emigrating. Shortly thereafter, the Nazis began transporting Jews to camps designed not just to incarcerate and torment Jews, but to kill them by the thousands.
One of the musicians who suffered from this persecution was Henry Meyer. Henry was born in 1923 into an affluent and musical family of Jewish merchants in the culturally rich city of Dresden, Germany. He received his first violin at the age of five and began taking lessons with one of the best violin teachers in the city. He quickly established himself as a child prodigy by playing chamber music alongside his accomplished parents as well as professional musicians.
Henry’s idyllic childhood ended when Hitler came to power in 1933. At the age of ten, Henry was expelled from his school and banned from social clubs, and was even stripped of his bicycle and pet dog. He was also forbidden to take lessons at the conservatory or the State Opera’s orchestral school. He took a few private lessons from the concertmaster of the opera until the Gestapo forced his new instructor to stop teaching him.
Henry’s parents wrote to family members in the United States asking for help with immigrating to America, but the relatives did not have the financial resources to vouch for a family of four. There was also the problem of America’s immigration regulations. Henry, his younger brother, and their mother fell under the German quotas. Henry’s father was subjected to the Polish quotas, since his hometown had been part of Poland when he was born. Securing permission to immigrate to the United States was difficult enough for Germans. For Poles, it was almost impossible.
When Henry was fifteen, he was invited to appear as a soloist with the small orchestra hosted by the Jewish Culture League in Dresden. Once again, fate intervened. The concert was scheduled for November 9, 1938—Kristallnacht. Instead of performing that night, Henry was arrested and sent to Buchenwald, where he was imprisoned alongside Erich Weininger. Henry was released a few weeks later when he was presented with the possibility of leaving the country. As with his family’s attempt to emigrate in 1933, these plans never materialized.
In 1939, Henry moved to Berlin, where he was accepted into the culture league orchestra. In addition to quickly establishing himself as an exceptional performer, Henry became the self-proclaimed “Benjamin of the orchestra,” as at the age of sixteen he was its youngest member. Henry also quickly grew close to fellow orchestra musicians Günther and Rosemarie Goldschmidt, often playing chamber music with the young couple.
When the Jewish Culture League was disbanded in August 1941, Henry was required to report to the employment office for labor service. Worried about his future as a violinist, he asked for work that would be easy on his hands.
“I have something for you,” the bureaucrat responded. “A company that makes Sanitary Articles.”36
Much to Henry’s embarrassment, these “Sanitary Articles” were condoms for the German army. Henry was assigned to work in the Fromms Act factory, where Jewish entrepreneur Julius Fromm had invented the rubber condom before being forced to sell his lucrative business to Hermann Göring’s godmother. Henry’s job was to liquefy the rubber with a hazardous mixture of industrial chemicals. He worked for twelve hours a day without the benefit of the gas mask and extra milk rations that the Aryan workers received to combat the effects of the toxic fumes. To make matters worse, the pre-vulcanized rubber proved to be anything but easy on his hands.
In early 1942, Henry returned to Dresden to be with his family during the impending deportations. He and his brother were forced to work at the Zeiss Ikon factory, making devices that became parts of triggers for time bombs. Because they were providing useful labor, the brothers were not chosen to accompany their parents when the elderly Meyers were transported to the ghetto in Riga, Latvia, that March. Their mother died in Riga. Their father survived the ghetto and a death march to Dachau. He would die there in 1945, two months before it was liberated.
In March 1943, Henry and his brother were marched from Dresden’s Hellerberg Ghetto to the Neustadt train station, where they were packed into cattle cars. Starving and cold, they rode for several days in a cramped and foul-smelling wagon. When the train stopped, they had no idea where they were. Voices from outside of the car commanded them to leave everything behind and get off the train. Through a hatch, Henry could see the steam of another locomotive. In the background was a sign for a place Henry had never heard of: Auschwitz.
Auschwitz
The largest and most notorious Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz was a large complex in Poland that actually included several camps. The oldest was the Auschwitz Main Camp, which was built after Nazi Germany’s defeat of Poland in 1939, by Jewish slave laborers from the eponymous town of Oświęcim. The Auschwitz Main Camp was a harsh penal complex where thousands of mostly Polish political prisoners were regularly tortured and executed. In 1941, the Nazis began constructing a camp that was much larger and even deadlier, a little less than two miles from the Auschwitz Main Camp. They named this second site Birkenau, after the German name for one of the Polish villages that had been razed to create the 15.5-square-mile camp. As the Birkenau extermination camp expanded, separate subcamps were developed for men, women, Roma, and Czechs. Gas chambers were erected to assist with the mass murders of the detainees. Crematoria were constructed to dispose of their remains. The Auschwitz III concentration camp was erected in 1942 to provide forced labor for the Buna chemical plant in nearby Monowitz. Over time, the Nazis built forty-five more satellite camps, mostly for forced labor.
Daily life in Auschwitz was so brutal that most of the prisoners died of exhaustion and starvation within weeks. After assembling for an early morning roll call, the detainees would march out of the camp for an entire day of torturous labor before dragging their fatigued bodies back to camp for an evening roll call. At the whim of the SS guards, additional roll calls could be held in the middle of the night, at which time the inmates were forced to stand at attention for hours in the rain and snow. Anyone who moved was sent to the gas chambers, as was anyone who appeared too sick or weak to continue working. Between those who were killed immediately upon arriving and those who perished in the camp, an estimated 1.6 million people, mostly Jews, died in Auschwitz.
Amateur violinist Jacques Stroumsa was deported to Auschwitz on April 30, 1943, as part of a transport of 2,500 Jews from Thessalonica, Greece. The Jews were herded into German cattle cars that were overcrowded with men, women, and children. M
ost of the deportees were forced to stand. They were given no food and just one bucket of drinking water for the entire car. They were also given a tub that was to serve as their communal toilet. From time to time, the locked doors would be opened from the outside, but only long enough to empty out the tub and refill the bucket. During a stop near Vienna, Jacques and another young man were chosen to help an SS officer unload some gold and jewelry the German had stolen in Greece. Other than that brief respite, all of the deportees remained in the packed and poorly ventilated cars for the entire eight-day journey to Auschwitz.
The transport arrived in Birkenau early in the morning of May 8. The doors were thrown open and the Jews were ordered out of the train. As the deportees frantically climbed down, they were blinded by a harsh spotlight and deafened by shouting voices and cracking whips. Disoriented, Jacques held on to his pregnant wife with one hand and his violin with the other, until the beatings forced him to let go of both. The Jews were lined up and quickly directed to a “selection,” where an SS officer directed each of them to the left or to the right. The officer pointed 815 healthy men and women between the ages of fifteen and fifty to the left. Although they did not know it at the time, being steered to the left meant that they had been selected for work details. The remaining 1,685 sick and elderly Jews were sent to the right. They would be taken to the gas chambers and killed that day.
While his wife and parents were sent to the right, Jacques and his brother were directed to the left. They were taken to an SS officer who interrogated them about how old they were, what they did for a living, and what languages they spoke. The officer was gauging how useful each new arrival would be to camp operations.