Violins of Hope (2 page)

The violin has formed an important aspect of Jewish culture for centuries. Many of the world's greatest violinists have been Jewish. This includes—but is certainly not limited to—the nineteenth-century dedicatees of the revered violin concertos by Brahms and Mendelssohn; twentieth-century masters Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, and Isaac Stern; and contemporary virtuosos Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, and Shlomo Mintz. Some scholars have even attributed the violin's invention to Jews who fled to Italy after Spain expelled its entire Jewish population in 1492. Since then, the instrument has played a vital role in professional life as a popular choice for classical Jewish musicians, as well as in communal life as an essential component of the enduring Klezmer tradition.

During the Holocaust, the violin assumed extraordinary new roles within the Jewish community. The instruments introduced in this book chronicle just a few of those functions.

For some musicians, the violin became a liberator that freed them and their families from Nazi tyranny. In 1936, Bronisław Huberman recruited seventy-five Jewish performers to form a new orchestra in Palestine, providing them with the legal and financial means to move safely out of Europe before it was too late (chapter 1). Ernst Glaser, the Jewish concertmaster of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, used his musical influence to escape a Nazi riot during a concert in Bergen in 1941. He eventually fled occupied Norway to Sweden, where he spent the remainder of the war performing and raising money for the Norwegian freedom fighters camped out along the border (chapter 4).

For many, the violin was a comforter in mankind's darkest hour. Erich Weininger was imprisoned in Dachau before being transferred to Buchenwald. After the British Quakers engineered his release in 1939, the Nazis allowed him to leave for Palestine, where Weininger and 3,500 other illegal immigrants were intercepted by British warships. They were deported to the island of Mauritius, where they were confined until the end of the war. Throughout those five years, Weininger brought comfort to himself and to his fellow prisoners by playing the violin in an orchestra with other detainees (chapter 2).

For others, the violin was a savior that spared their lives in concentration camps and ghettos. The members of the orchestras in Auschwitz played as the work details marched in and out of the concentration camp every day. In exchange, they often received lighter work details and better food—providing them with their best chances for survival (chapter 3). In the ghettoized Romanian territory of Transnistria, Feivel Wininger performed at weddings and parties in exchange for leftovers that he could bring back to his family. By playing the violin, Wininger was able to spare sixteen family members and friends from starvation (chapter 5).

In at least one case, the violin was an avenger that brought retribution for murdered family members. After his parents and sister were executed, Mordechai “Motele” Schlein joined Uncle Misha's Jewish Group, a band of Jewish combatants who were fighting the Nazis in the dense forests of Poland and Ukraine. In August 1943, Motele infiltrated a Nazi Soldiers Club, where he was hired to provide entertainment during meals. Every night, Motele would hide his violin in the Soldiers Club and take home an empty violin case. He would return the next morning with a few pounds of explosives hidden in that case. When high-ranking SS officers arrived for a visit, Motele blew up the building (chapter 6).

For the family of Shimon Krongold, a violin is one of the only remaining mementos of their beloved relative. After Shimon died of typhus in Central Asia, a survivor brought the instrument to Shimon's brother in Jerusalem. The violin and a picture of Shimon holding the instrument are the only items of Shimon's legacy that survived the Holocaust (epilogue).

Although today Shimon Krongold's Violin and the other Violins of Hope serve as memorials of those who perished, during the Holocaust they represented optimism for the future.

Wherever there were violins, there was hope.

 

 

I
n the early twentieth century, Jews living in Germany were participating in the intellectual and cultural life of their county in ways that would have been inconceivable in previous eras. In 1925, Jews comprised 16 percent of physicians, 15 percent of dentists, and 25 percent of lawyers in the German state of Prussia, even though they formed less than 1 percent of the general population. In addition to holding prominent positions in the banking industry and on university faculties, Jews were disproportionately represented in Germany's artistic scene, representing 3 percent of professionals in music and theater, 4 percent in the film industry, and 7 percent of visual artists and writers.

Tragically, the increase in Jewish success in professional life was accompanied by a rise in anti-Semitism. Discrimination against Jews was, of course, not limited to Germany, and it was certainly not anything new. Ever since the birth of Christianity, gentiles had looked upon Jews with suspicion, blaming them for everything from the death of Jesus Christ to natural disasters. The persistent myth of the “blood libel” even accused Jews of using the blood of Christian children for religious rituals, particularly the making of the unleavened bread for Passover.

In the years following World War I, right-wing Germans blamed the Jews for their demoralizing losses on the battlefield, as well as for the social and economic turbulence that followed. Jews were falsely accused of stabbing the country in the back by failing to adequately support the war effort. The right wing maintained that it was this betrayal, not weaknesses in the military, that had ultimately led to Germany's defeat. They contended that the only way to restore Germany to its former glory was to rid the country of the Jews who were responsible for its ruin.

The assimilation of Jews into German society was also blamed for a perceived decline in German culture. Germany had dominated classical music from J. S. Bach in the early eighteenth century to Richard Wagner in the late nineteenth century. The end of that two-hundred-year supremacy was attributed to the Jewish composers and composition teachers who eschewed traditional Germanic tonal structures in favor of modernist compositional processes. The international Jewish influences that championed atonality, it was argued, had undermined German culture. One prominent conservative composer even drew a parallel between the “impotence” and “decay” in German musical tastes and the decline in German society that had led to the country's otherwise inexplicable military defeat.
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Immediately after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, he and his Nazi Party initiated an agenda to rid Germany of the Jewish influences that they blamed for the country's downfall. On April 7, Hitler ratified the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. The new law called for the removal of Jews from all public positions, but its interpretation was later expanded to exclude employment at private institutions, as well. It mandated the dismissal of Jewish personnel at police and fire stations, post offices, libraries and museums, and especially at cultural institutions. Jewish musicians who worked for music conservatories, orchestras, and opera companies quickly found themselves out of work.

Ernst Böhm had been serving as the solo contrabassist for the West German Radio Orchestra in Cologne for seven years when he received instructions to stay away from the radio building until further notice. The order claimed that the injunction was just temporary, but Böhm would never play with the orchestra again. On June 29, the Reich Broadcasting Association sent the West German Radio a list of “non-Aryan” and “politically unreliable” employees who were to be fired in keeping with the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.
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Böhm's name was at the top of that list. He was officially dismissed exactly one month later.

The decisions over which musicians would keep their jobs were left to the newly created Reich Chamber of Music. Founded by Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels as one of seven departments within the Reich Chamber of Culture, the Chamber of Music oversaw all professional musical activities in the country. To assist with the restoration of Germany's musical supremacy, the Chamber of Music made sure that only “good German music” such as the compositions of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Mozart, and Wagner were performed. Strictly forbidden was “Degenerate Music” such as jazz, atonal works, and any compositions by Jewish composers such as Mahler, Mendelssohn, and Meyerbeer. The chamber also controlled who performed the approved music. To earn money by performing, one had to be a member of the Chamber of Music. To be a member of the Chamber of Music, one could not be a Jew.

Given the Jewish propensity for string instruments—especially the violin—it is not surprising that Jews had been especially overrepresented in the string sections of professional orchestras. Once the dismissals began, their absence was felt immediately in those ensembles. German composer Georg Haentzschel once remarked that he noticed that the Jewish musicians were disappearing, “because the violin sections were getting thinner and thinner.”
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A minority of internationally renowned Jewish musicians were fortunate enough to have the means to leave Germany. Arnold Schoenberg, the Jewish composer who is considered to be the father of atonal music, had little choice but to flee. He ended up in the United States, along with former concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic Szymon Goldberg, virtuoso violin soloist Fritz Kreisler, and a number of other famous conductors, performers, and composers. All in all, the United States served as the sanctuary for approximately half of all Jewish immigrants from Germany and Austria, including 465 musicians.

Many outstanding performers stayed behind. While they were indeed well trained and highly skilled, they had not yet established the level of international prestige that would have attracted offers from orchestras outside of Germany. Others might have been able to secure employment, but lacked the resources to move abroad. Jews who wished to emigrate with their families had to secure the sufficient travel funds up front. They would then have to navigate through an intentionally difficult Nazi bureaucracy for the necessary tax clearance certificates and exit permits. Finally, they would be able to leave Germany only if the immigration quotas established by their destination countries had not already been met.

There was also a subset of the Jewish population that simply did not want to leave their homes. Some—especially those who were decorated veterans of World War I—were patriotic Germans who refused to believe that they would really be in danger in their beloved homeland. They convinced themselves that their country's experiment with Nazism would be so short-lived that any inconveniences would be temporary. Tragically, they could not have been more wrong.

Percussionist Kurt Sommerfeld was one of the hundreds of Jewish musicians who were dismissed from their orchestral positions. After being fired when the Berlin Municipal Orchestra was purged of its Jewish performers, Sommerfeld registered with the employment office, where he found little sympathy. “That's no problem,” the clerk told him sarcastically. “Go to the Jewish cemetery and become a Jewish gardener.”
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Determined to make his living as a musician, Sommerfeld answered an advertisement for a drummer in a coffeehouse band. The gig was going fine until a man in the audience stood up and shouted, “Waiter, a round of beer for the band, except for the Jew back there. No beer for him!”
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Sommerfeld walked off the stage, quitting the job on the spot.

Sommerfeld was out of work again, but not for long. In September 1933, he became the first of many unemployed Jewish orchestral musicians to find refuge in the Culture League of German Jews.

The Culture League of German Jews was founded in 1933 by Kurt Baumann, a twenty-six-year-old production assistant who had worked for the capital city's most prominent opera houses: the Berlin State Opera, the People's Theater, and the Municipal Opera. Baumann realized that the 175,000 Jews who lived in Berlin—approximately a third of Germany's Jewish population—could support their own cultural activities as well as any medium-sized city could. He worked out a plan for a Jewish culture league and presented it to his mentor Kurt Singer, a charismatic former deputy director of the Municipal Opera who had already been thinking along the same lines. Their plan was bold: to maintain a presence for Jewish culture in Germany while also providing modest incomes for out-of-work Jewish artists.