Violins of Hope (18 page)

“That doesn't sound good,” Ernst thought to himself, nervously wondering if the same could be said for his delay in leaving the country.

Fortunately, it was not too late. After the concert, Ernst escaped into a car that was waiting for him by city hall and vanished. He was taken to meet Søren Christian Sommerfelt, who worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Sommerfelt gave Ernst some money and told him to hide with an accomplice in Oslo and await further instructions. He would be taken out of the country as soon as possible.

Other Jewish men were not as fortunate. On October 26 and 27, 260 of them were arrested and taken to the Bredtveit Prison, just outside Oslo. From there they were transported by train to the Berg concentration camp, where they were joined on October 28 by 350 other Jewish men. The prisoners spent the next month suffering from starvation, inadequate medical care, and an absence of clothing and bedding in a facility that lacked water and sanitation.

The first Jews to arrive in the Berg concentration camp were trumpeter Herman Sachnowitz, his four brothers, and their father. The Sachnowitz family had been contemplating leaving Norway ever since the German invasion, but the four oldest males were continually arrested by the Nazis. Knowing that whichever Sachnowitz was being held captive at any given time would be shot if any of the others fled the country, the family had no choice but to stay. All five male members of the Sachnowitz family were arrested at four thirty in the morning on October 26 and taken to Berg.

On November 26, 1942, the Sachnowitz men and around 275 other prisoners from the Berg concentration camp were transported on a special train back to Oslo, where they were reunited with 562 Jews, including women, children, and elderly people. Among them was one of Herman's sisters. They had all been arrested the night before as the final stage of a campaign to round up not just the males but every Jew who remained in Norway.

Jews who held citizenships in England, America, Central and South America, neutral countries, and countries allied with Germany were spared from deportation. The remaining 532 were put on the German troop ship
Donau
, sailed to Stettin—the same Polish seaport from which Germany had embarked for its invasion of Norway in 1940—and loaded into cattle cars bound for Auschwitz. There 186 able-bodied men were put to work in Birkenau and Auschwitz III, while 346 women, children, and elderly people were sent directly to the gas chambers.

On March 3, 1943, 158 Jews who had been interned in the Bredtveit Prison after missing the first deportation arrived in Auschwitz. From this second transport, thirty-eight were put to work while 120 Jews of ages ranging from fourteen months to eighty years were sent to their deaths.

Herman Sachnowitz's father and sister were selected for death immediately upon disembarking at Auschwitz in November 1942, as were both of Herman's remaining sisters when they arrived in March 1943. Herman and his four brothers were among those from the first transport who were sent to work at Auschwitz III. Herman's three older brothers would die in Auschwitz III within four months. Herman's little brother would later die in Josef Mengele's infamous experimental block.

Herman's own life was spared in August 1943. That was when he was accepted as a trumpeter into the newly formed orchestra at Auschwitz III, an ensemble with which he performed until the camp was evacuated on January 18, 1945. He was transferred to Buchenwald and then to Bergen-Belsen, where he was liberated on April 15. He traveled back to Norway as quickly as possible and returned to his home. It was empty. Herman was the only member of his entire family who had survived.

The Sachnowitz family was certainly not the only Norwegian family to be completely erased during the Holocaust. Of the 762 Jews deported from Norway, all but twenty-three died in German concentration camps.

On October 27, 1942, while Herman and more than six hundred other Jewish men were being taken to the Berg concentration camp, Ernst was secretly taken to see Lise Børsum, a key figure in Geldmacher's circle who was later arrested for her role in the Norwegian resistance. It was in Børsum's house that Geldmacher had met with and mobilized forty members of the Norwegian resistance movement two days earlier. And it was Børsum herself who would arrange Ernst's escape to Sweden. Børsum informed Ernst that he would have to leave Kari and their daughters behind in Norway. At the time, nobody guessed that the Nazis would come for the Jewish women and children one month later.

Ernst was given shelter by a man named Hasselberg, whose wife was out of town. While he hid at Hasselberg's house, Ernst had two tasks: to cook dinner and to avoid being seen through the windows. On his second day at Hasselberg's house, Ernst received a visit from Kari. She informed him that he would be leaving that day. She gave him a series of complex instructions from Børsum. The cloak-and-dagger plot to get Ernst out of Norway sounded like something out of a spy novel.

Ernst would be picked up by Berit Poulsson, who was disabled and who was therefore allowed to drive wherever she wanted. Poulsson would drive him to the train station, where he was to wait for Amalie Christie. When Christie arrived, Ernst would pretend to ignore her, as if she were a total stranger. He would follow her as she boarded the train. Through a secret signal, she would draw his attention to a luggage compartment that would contain a backpack full of items he would need for his journey.

Ernst did as he was instructed. He even had Kari cut off all of his hair in the hopes that nobody would recognize him. It was raining, so he was able to shield himself from view underneath a large umbrella. Since holding a violin case would ruin his disguise, Ernst left behind his personal violin—an excellent instrument made by the eighteen-century violinmaker Giovanni Battista Guadagnini that his father had bought for him. While Ernst was waiting for Christie at the crowded train station, Børsum showed up. She brought with her a letter that she explained was a coded message. She instructed Ernst to take the document with him to Sweden. “Of the group with which you are going, you seem to be the most sensible,” she said. “So please keep this with you and deliver it to the Norwegian legation in Stockholm.”

Ernst boarded a train that would take him toward Hamar, seventy-five miles north of Oslo. His disguise seemed sufficient until he heard someone calling his name. A young man whom Ernst did not recognize told him to get off the train.

Ernst was relieved to see that the young man was accompanied by Christie. The young man pushed something into Ernst's hand. It was Swedish kroner, to give Ernst a little extra money. Then he gave Ernst his final instructions from the Norwegian resistance movement in Oslo. Until then, Ernst had not been informed of his destination, out of fear that he would be arrested and tortured into betraying details about the escape routes being cultivated by the resistance movement. Now that he was safely on board the train, Ernst was told to disembark at Romedal, the last station before Hamar, and find a taxi driver named Thorleif Bronken.

Once the train was finally under way, Ernst hid his face behind a newspaper. Despite his efforts to travel incognito, a young woman on the train recognized Norway's most famous living musician.

“Aren't you Mr. Glaser?” she asked.

“No, I'm afraid you're mistaken,” he audaciously replied.

When Ernst disembarked at Romedal, he and four other escapees were whisked away in Thorleif Bronken's taxi. They were driven to a small schoolhouse in Åsbygda, where a teacher named Kjellaug Herset lived. The escapees hid in the schoolhouse attic for two nights, maintaining complete silence during the days. If Herset's Nazi colleague heard something fall on the floor, a bed squeak, or any other noise overhead, it could have meant their deaths. On the second night, Kjellaug's fiancé Lars Sagberg informed the escapees that he would take them by truck to the Glomma River, which runs near the Swedish border. They would cross the river on a barge. Another guide would help them finish the journey over the mountainous terrain on foot.

A few weeks before helping Ernst and the other four refugees get to the Glomma, Sagberg had met with another group of escapees in the schoolhouse. The nine refugees had gathered around a radio listening to the BBC, whose broadcasts had been forbidden. After Sagberg changed the channel to the Nazi-controlled station in Oslo, they all heard a declaration that anyone who helped Jews escape the country would receive the death penalty. The escapees bristled and looked at Sagberg nervously.

“Oh, that makes no difference,” he assured them.

“Doesn't it frighten you to hear that there is a death penalty for helping a Jew, when there are nine of us?” one refugee asked Herset.

“That makes nine death penalties,” she responded defiantly.

“This is something we have heard several times before, so we're not worried,” Sagberg confirmed.
⁷⁵

After crossing the Glomma, Ernst and the other escapees in his convoy were taken to a log cabin. During their second night at the cabin, they started their journey on foot. A farmer followed behind the group on a horse and sled to cover their tracks. After several hours of walking through the snowy night, they arrived at another log cabin, where they were given food and coffee. Cold, wet, and tired, they were hoping to find a warm place to rest, but the log cabin was unheated. So they continued their journey. They did not find another log cabin until 1 a.m. the next day.

Ernst was exhausted. He was in no shape for this type of physical activity. One of his knees had become so stiff from overuse that it would no longer move. He fashioned a cane to assist him the rest of the way. He was also freezing. Other than the long coat he had brought with him, he was not properly dressed for hiking in the snow. He was given a raincoat, but he was so short that the coat dragged on the ground when he walked. To make matters worse, when he placed his soaked ski boots next to the fire to dry them, they shrank so much that he could not put them back on.

On the next day, a third guide rowed the refugees across a lake to Sweden. Ernst made his way to Stockholm, where he knew he would have the best chance of earning a living through playing the violin. He also intended to take the letter from Christie to the Norwegian legation. It was only later that Ernst opened the letter to find that it contained not a coded message but money. It was the same amount that Ernst had held in his bank account in Norway. It was his to spend.

Ernst's wife Kari and their daughters fled to Sweden a few weeks after him. Warned of impending danger by the girls' schoolteachers, they escaped Oslo just as the Nazis started rounding up women and children. Although Kari would have been considered an Aryan by Germany's Nuremberg Laws, Quisling's severe interpretations of Jewishness would have included her for being married to a Jew. She and her daughters—who despite having been christened would be considered Jewish by virtue of having a Jewish father—would have been arrested, deported to Auschwitz, and sent directly to the gas chambers.

At first, Kari and the girls traveled north, just as Ernst had done. They hid on a farm in Hamar for three weeks before being sent back to Oslo. After returning to the capital city, they continued traveling south. When they reached the southeastern Norwegian border town of Ørje, they walked in the rain toward the Swedish border with twelve other women and children.

After becoming separated from their guide and getting lost in the forest, they arrived at a farm the next morning. Approaching the farmhouse could have meant walking right into the arms of Nazi sympathizers, but Kari had no choice. By this time, seven-year-old Liv and nine-year-old Berit were too cold and exhausted to continue any farther.

Kari knocked on the door. When an old woman answered, Kari blurted out that they were refugees on their way to Sweden who had gotten lost. The old woman proved to be friendly. She informed them that they were still in Norway, and had been heading in the wrong direction. She invited them in for coffee and told them, “You must not stay here for longer than an hour, because there are inspections here every morning.

“But you are not far from the border,” she assured Kari. “My husband will guide you across.”

After struggling to wake the exhausted children, Kari and the girls continued their journey. She and her daughters joined Ernst in Stockholm on December 19.

Ernst's parents had an even more difficult odyssey. They had escaped Nazi Germany just a few years earlier and were now fleeing a second country. Exhausted and freezing in the Norwegian winter, the elderly couple could not keep up with their transport. There were Germans in the same forest that night with dogs and guns searching for two deserters, but the elder Glasers simply could not run anymore. They found a stump in the forest and sat down. Their guide did not realize that they had fallen behind until much later. He brought the rest of the group to the border and went back to Norway for the Glasers. When he found them later that night, they were sitting by themselves in the woods, holding hands, expecting to die together. Instead, he brought them safely to Sweden.

In Stockholm, Ernst used his contacts to establish a new life. He and his family stayed with old friends who owned an antiquarian bookstore. He borrowed a violin from the son-in-law of the late concertmaster of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. It was not until several months later that Ernst would be reunited with his Guadagnini violin, which Geldmacher smuggled into Sweden hidden in a suitcase full of clothes.

When Ernst visited the Swedish Music Society, he was told that he was free to give concerts, but that as a refugee he was ineligible for steady employment. In the spring of 1943 he was nevertheless hired by Georg Schnéevoigt, the Finnish conductor who had led Ernst's last concert in Oslo. Schnéevoigt was the principal conductor of the symphony in Malmö, Sweden's third-largest city after Stockholm and Gothenburg. Despite strict regulations that only Swedes could be hired for paid positions, Schnéevoigt was able to use his considerable influence to not only appoint Ernst as the orchestra's substitute concertmaster, but also to get Ernst a job teaching at the music conservatory in Malmö.