While not intrinsically great instruments, Jewish-owned violins, cellos and violas that somehow survived the concentration camps live on in concert.
Among the many perverse facts of the Holocaust is there were
camp orchestras. Talented instrumentalists from the Jewish and “Gypsy” (Roma)
communities involuntarily held by the murderous regime were put to work to
provide music. Their audiences were new arrivals as they disembarked from
cattle cars, some as they were led to certain death while others judged healthy
enough to work to barracks. Some of the musicians were forced to entertain
their captors at parties.
It’s impossible to not mentally summon the theme from Schindler’s List, the 1993 movie about the Holocaust
(composed and conducted by John Williams, featuring violinist Itzhak Perlman).
The music performed by the camp orchestras included marches, parlor music,
dance music, popular music of the day, film and operetta melodies, the works of
Richard Wagner and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In Auschwitz composer Henryk
Krol wrote Arbeitslagermarsch, the Concentration Camp
Labor March.
Since 1996, the father and son team of Amnon and Avshalom Weinstein,
based in Tel Aviv, have been collecting the violins, violas
and cellos that were owned by these camp musicians before and during World War
2. The collection has grown to more than 60 instruments, each with a story:
Some were used in the camps; some were tossed from those trains as they were
headed to the camps. The collection is known as the Violins of Hope.
One instrument in the collection, the Auschwitz violin, was
made around 1850 in Germany and was purchased in the post-War years from a
penniless survivor. Like many of the stringed
instruments, it was neither rare nor valuable. Another German-made violin,
circa 1900, was tossed from a train traveling from France by a desperate man
who said “In the place where I now go I don’t need a violin – here, take my
violin so it may live!” A worker obliged his request but never played it.
Decades later his children told the story to a violinmaker in the South of
France who purchased it and turned it over to the Weinsteins for the Violins of
Hope project.
But Violins of Hope is more than instruments that the
Weinsteins have restored to playing condition. It’s a series of concerts using
these instruments, held around the world, accompanied by discussions on the
significance of the instruments. Despite the fact these are not Stradivarius
violins, virtuosos the likes of Shlomo Mintz (Jerusalem), David Russell (music
professor at the University of North Carolina) and others play them. Upcoming
concerts in 2019 and 2020 are in Louisville, Kentucky; Fort Wayne, Indiana; San
Francisco; and Los Angeles.
Amnon Weinstein told National Public Radio in 2012 that
violins were commonly displayed on the walls of Jewish homes, particularly
among Orthodox Jews who were forbidden from displaying portraits or sculpture.
He was first asked to restore one such violin in the early 1960s by a
musician-survivor who had been part of the Auschwitz Men’s Orchestra, but
Weinstein was repulsed by the presence of ashes inside the instrument and
refused to work with it – in part because he himself had lost many family
members to the Holocaust.
Weinstein’s emotions on that had softened by the 1990s when
he launched Violins of Hope. “All instruments have a common denominator,” he
says on his website. “They had to do with the war. To be more specific, they
had to do with the Holocaust – death or survival. And hope. All instruments
were symbols of hope and a way to say, remember me, remember us. Life is good,
celebrate it for those who perished, for those who survived. For all people.”
That clearly includes the doomed violinist on that French
train. His violin miraculously survives. “The sound of violins is often
compared to the beauty of the human voice,” Weinstein writes. “When played with
talent and spirit, it is known to reach out and touch hearts. This was the role
of violins in the war – to touch hearts, kindle hope for better times and
spread it around. Wherever there was music, there was hope.”
