Music was always an important part of Jewish communal life in Europe. In particular, the violin, nearly always the lead instrument in the various Klezmer bands so popular before World War II, was central to the culture of virtually every Jewish ghetto and town throughout Eastern Europe.
Exhibited with this column is a 2014 Israel “Violins that Survived the Holocaust” stamp, which depicts the entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and a drawing of a Jewish musician playing a violin marked with a yellow Magen David. At the bottom of the stamp tab is the famous quote from Kings II, 3:15: “And it was that when the musician played, that the hand of Hashem came upon him [the prophet Elisha].” The first-day cover envelope shows a photograph taken by Paul Ricken of the Jewish orchestra at Mauthausen before its players were murdered there on July 30, 1942.
The Nazis established Jewish orchestras in some concentration camps to provide entertainment for Nazi troops; to calm new Jewish prisoners as they arrived at the site of their extermination; and, sometimes, for sham performances to prove to the outside world how well Jews were being treated in the death camps. There were several Jewish orchestras operating at the same time in Auschwitz, as well as ensembles performing in Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Lodz.
During the war the Germans seized many violins from their Jewish owners, and though a few were recovered after the Holocaust, most were broken or destroyed. Some of these special violins reached Amnon Weinstein, a Tel Aviv violin maker who dedicated his life to restoring the instruments and documenting their incredible stories. (See, for example, “Amnon’s Journey,” a documentary about Weinstein in which violinist Shlomo Mintz, while standing on the exact spot where the main camp orchestra once played, famously performs on one of the “Violins of Hope” in Auschwitz.)
One surviving violin is “Moteleh’s Violin,” which was owned by 12-year old Mordechai Schlein. When Nazi officers heard him playing in the street in 1944, they ordered him to perform for them in their club. Using the opportunity to smuggle explosives in his violin case, he blew up the club but was later caught and executed. A second surviving violin was owned by a French Jew who, en route to Auschwitz, tossed his instrument out to track workers, telling them that if he did not survive, he hoped his violin would. It did. He didn’t.
The following is the poignant tale of a Holocaust violin Mr. Weinstein likely never saw:
It is August 1973, and the sweltering summer heat permeates the Brooklyn apartment. Though I have known Isaac’s mother for many years and have just about become a fixture in their family living room, I could not begin to understand why, after correctly identifying the melody I had been humming as Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor, Mrs. R. had run out of the room weeping. Though I knew she was a concentration camp survivor, I had not been aware before this afternoon that she had been a violinist for a leading German orchestra before Hitler’s rise to power.
Isaac explains that his mother had somehow regained her violin, but that it had not been so much as touched since its liberation from Auschwitz. My humming must have evoked Mrs. R.’s recollection of the death of the music wrought by the place called Oswieciem. Though Hitler had successfully removed the music from her beautiful, skilled hands, I couldn’t help thinking: had he also removed it from her soul?
With all the foolhardiness of youth, I want to try to restore it to her, so many years later, in the safety of the home in which she has always welcomed me. So when Mrs. R. reemerges and apologizes – apologizes! – for having lost her composure, I ask her to play something for me. To her horrified protests, I answer with the absolute moral certainty of the untested young: “With all that the Nazis succeeded in destroying, you must not allow them this victory. You cannot allow them to kill the beauty, the gift that The Creator himself saw fit to entrust to you.” Her arguments grow ever weaker and, finally, she relents.
Were I a painter, this would be my masterpiece, because the image has remained preserved virtually intact in my memory…the fall of light on the worn carpet and the old furniture, the shadowy late afternoon silhouettes mysteriously moving about in the far corners, the mixed shades and hues of color splashing across the room…all unmarred by the passage of time. And there she stood, barely clearing five feet, her sweet, distinctly European face contorted with pain.
I only now figure out the probable source of her pronounced limp. Her world-weary eyes, usually radiating keen intelligence and warmth, are streaming tears at least as hot as the air in that steam room passing for an apartment. Framed by the late afternoon light pouring in from the window behind her, she grasps her instrument in the manner of a squeamish high-school biology student grasping a laboratory frog’s innards and she handles the bow like it is some kind of Martian object completely foreign to human physiology. The large clock in the corner ticks off the seconds; they become minutes. “Aha!” her face finally registers, as if she has solved a most challenging puzzle, “these two objects somehow go together!” She looks up, and seems astonished to discover that we are there.
“But what shall I play?” she whispers.
“How about the Mendelssohn?” I helpfully suggest.
Things start to move quickly now. Her fingers are on the bridge of the violin; her eyes are closed. She throws the bow at the instrument almost in anger, as if tossing a chair at an intruder who has just broken into her apartment at midnight. She is…playing.
I am not a professional musician, though I like to think of myself as a knowledgeable amateur, but I can tell she is good. Her tone is fine, and her fingers, drawing on some deeply entombed memory she is suddenly able to resurrect, take on a life of their own, moving with more confidence. Isaac stares at his mother with his mouth agape and I am afraid to move, lest I inadvertently disturb some fine, unseen strand of ethereal matter that would cause the entire scene to collapse inward upon itself. Out of the walls of the room stream six million ghosts, summoned by this Pied Piper of Auschwitz; they shimmer, and then they, too, are gone.
And then, seemingly mid-note, it ends. Mrs. R. hurls the violin at the couch, screeching, “It’s horrible! I sound so horrible!” and again runs out of the room, sobbing. I look at the abandoned instrument, lying unwanted and rejected on the couch. I realize I may not be entirely emotionally stable at this moment, but it seems to be staring back at me reproachfully. The staring contest between Man and Instrument continues unabated until Isaac slowly moves to the couch, gently places the violin in its case, and removes it from the room.
None of us ever spoke of the incident again, and things thereafter continued much as they always had. But I have never forgotten the pain that woman experienced some 30 years and 4,000 miles removed from the Land of the Final Solution.
