Violins of Hope (29 page)

Another instrument that has been returned to its owner's family once belonged to Shimon Krongold, an amateur violinist whose accomplished daughter had played with the Warsaw Philharmonic. Shimon's brother Chaim immigrated to Palestine in 1923, never to see Shimon again. Chaim married and raised two children, who knew little about their uncle Shimon beyond what they could glean from an old picture of him holding his beloved violin. Chaim heard that Shimon escaped from Warsaw to Russia and then to Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Later, he learned that Shimon had died of typhus in Tashkent.

In 1946, a man visited Chaim's apartment in Jerusalem. Chaim's daughter-in-law answered the doorbell.

“Are you Krongold?” the stranger asked.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Do you have any connection to Shimon Krongold?”

“Yes, of course we knew about him.”

“Well, I have something for you from him.” The stranger unfolded a shabby blanket that he was carrying in his arms. Inside was a violin. “This violin belonged to Shimon,” he explained. He refused to provide any details about how he had come into possession of the instrument.

By this time, Chaim had gotten involved in the conversation. He was a prominent lawyer. He knew his rights. “Okay, if it belonged to him, it belongs to the family,” he stated. “So would you please leave the violin with us?”

“Yes, of course,” the stranger responded. But only in exchange for money.

“Why should I buy the violin that belonged to him?” Chaim demanded. “Did you buy it from him? Did you pay for this?”

The stranger still would not answer. Instead, he simply turned to walk away with the instrument.

Chaim was outraged by the injustice. He had already lost Shimon, and now a cagey stranger was demanding money to return Shimon's violin, which Chaim felt was his rightful property. He was willing to let the man and the violin go, but his wife intervened. She darted from the kitchen and caught up with the stranger.

“What do you want for it?” she asked.

The man quoted a reasonable price for the instrument, which Chaim's wife agreed to pay. Chaim's son Nadir remembers the amount being around 250 U.S. dollars.

The violin stayed with the Krongold family in Jerusalem as one of their only remembrances of Shimon. Nadir later traveled to Tashkent to try to find his uncle's grave, but even the Jewish community there was unable to uncover any information about him. All that is left of Shimon is the photograph of him with the violin and the instrument itself. “This is the only memory that we have from him,” Nadir explains. “The only memory and the only story about his life.”
⁸⁷

In September 1999, Amnon gave an interview on the radio about Motele Schlein's Violin. He asked listeners to contact him if they knew of any other instruments that were connected to the Holocaust. Nadir and his sister Edna responded by bringing him their uncle's violin. After comparing the photograph of Shimon with the instrument the family had purchased, Amnon was able to verify that this was indeed Shimon Krongold's Violin.

The biggest surprise came when Amnon peered into one of the violin's
f
-shaped sound holes. Attached to the inside of the instrument is a label that reads, in a combination of Hebrew and Yiddish: “This violin I made to commemorate my loyal friend Mr. Shimon Krongold, Warsaw, 1924.” The dedication is signed by Yaakov Zimmerman. Amnon was holding in his hands an instrument that was made by the very same man who had taught his father how to repair violins more than sixty years earlier. The circle was complete.

For every violin that is recovered, there are thousands that may never be returned to the families of their previous owners. This includes dozens of instruments that Amnon has collected while scouring the world for violins with connections to the Holocaust. While the instruments have survived, information about the musicians who once played them has not. There is simply no way of tracking down the original owners—if those violinists or anyone in their family even survived the Holocaust.

While their owners are unknown, the craftsmanship of their construction and the ornate Stars of David they bear indicate that they were once owned by Jewish musicians. Klezmer performers often decorated their instruments with Jewish symbols. The more “Jewish” the violin looked, the more likely that the local rabbi would recommend that its owner be hired to play at weddings—and the more likely that the performer would receive a few extra coins or a little extra food from the celebrants. One of the violins with a Star of David also features a lion's head, to which its owner later added two decorative diamonds that no doubt delighted the children in his audience. A violin by Yaakov Zimmerman—one of three in Amnon's collection, including Shimon Krongold's Violin—is adorned with no fewer than five Stars of David.

Amnon has deduced that some of the unclaimed instruments were played in ghettos and concentration camps, based on distinctive damage to the tops of the violins that comes only from being played outside in the wind, rain, and snow—something no musician would have ever done unless he was forced to do so under extraordinary conditions. Auschwitz Main Camp violinist Teodor Liese once spoke of liters of water pouring out of his instrument while the orchestra was performing in the rain.
⁸⁸
One of the instruments was damaged beyond repair. Amnon has left it in the ruined state in which he found it, as a testament to the thousands of other instruments and the millions of lives that were shattered in the Holocaust.

Amnon considers the unidentified violins to be the most precious instruments in his collection. They are not expensive instruments like the Ole Bull Guarneri that Ernst Glaser brought to Bergen or the Amati that Feivel Wininger played in Transnistria. They are simple, unsophisticated violins that represent the everyday Jewish lives and the everyday Jewish traditions that were destroyed during the Holocaust. They are artifacts of the Jewish culture that the Nazis tried unsuccessfully to wipe off the planet. To Amnon, the historical and sentimental value of these instruments far surpasses any monetary worth.

Amnon has never known the names of any of his uncles, aunts, and cousins who died in the Holocaust. Since they were buried in mass graves, there are no graveyards to help him piece together his genealogy. There are no family records, nor surviving relatives whom he can visit to learn the stories about the family members that his parents had been too grief-stricken to talk about. His only way of connecting with his family is through the craft his father taught him: repairing violins.

And so Amnon continues to collect and restore instruments that were played by Jewish musicians during the Holocaust. Each violin tells its own story. Each violin is a tombstone for a relative he never knew.

I first became aware of the Violins of Hope in 2008, just after the instruments had been featured in the historic concert at the foot of Jerusalem's Old City walls. At that time, three administrators and colleagues from my university—Ken Lambla (dean of the College of Arts and Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte), Royce Lumpkin (chair of the Department of Music), and David Russell (Anne R. Belk distinguished professor of violin)—were initiating a plan to bring the Violins of Hope to the Western Hemisphere for the first time. This bold initiative came to fruition in April 2012, when UNC Charlotte and numerous cultural and educational partners came together for an impressive series of exhibitions, performances, lectures, and films.

As my university planned for the events in Charlotte, I grew increasingly fascinated by what I was hearing about Amnon Weinstein. My recent research had focused on music in Hungary before, during, and after the Holocaust, so the Violins of Hope project resonated with me on a human, artistic, and scholarly level—a perfect storm of intellectual curiosity. In February 2011, I spent a week with Amnon and his charming wife Assi in Tel Aviv, seeing the instruments for myself and learning more about Amnon's journey. It was during this trip that I became inspired to write a book about the violins and the musicians who once played them.

Over the course of researching
Violins of Hope
, I have been honored to meet and interview the descendants of several of the figures profiled in this book, including Freddy Davidovitz; Seffi Hanegbi; Nadir Krongold; Berit, Liv, and Ernst Simon Glaser, as well as their stepbrother, Torleif Torgersen; Mona and Solveig Levin; Helen Wininger Livnat; and Ze'ev Weininger. In Norway in particular, I received friendly assistance from Steinar Birkeland and Thomas Hellum (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation), Hilde Holbæk-Hanssen (Music Information Center), Lorentz Reitan (Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra), and Magne Seland (National Library). Stanley Bergman, John Cox, Susanna Glaser, David Goldman, Mindle Crystel Gross, Joseph Itiel, Martin Jacobs, Henia Lewin, Myra Mniewski, Nofar Moshe, Anne Parelius, and Benjamin Still also provided a great deal of assistance throughout my research. I am especially grateful to my agent, John Rudolph of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, for believing in this project from the very beginning, as well as to my editor Claire Wachtel and associate editor Hannah Wood at HarperCollins for their expert assistance in seeing the book through to publication.

I would like to express my gratitude to the Ghetto Fighters' House Museum, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Yad Vashem, as well as to Ernst Simon Glaser, Nadir Krongold, Helen Wininger Livnat, and Amnon Weinstein for giving me permission to reproduce historical photographs from their collections. The views or opinions expressed in this book, and the context in which the images are used, do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of, nor imply approval or endorsement by, those institutions and individuals.

This work was supported in part by funds provided by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and its College of Arts and Architecture. Invaluable support was also provided by the Lois Lehrman Grass Foundation.

I am very grateful to my father Robert J. Grymes for his assistance and companionship during my research trips to Israel, as well as to my brother Chris for his continual encouragement. Most of all, I must thank my wife Elizabeth and our daughter Helen for their love and patience. I simply could not have written this book without their support.

  
1
.
   
Levi,
Music in the Third Reich
, 4.

  
2
.
   
Lühe,
Die Musik war unsere Rettung
, 93.

  
3
.
   
Kater, “Jewish Musicians in the Third Reich,” 75.

  
4
.
   
Sommerfeld, “Kein Bier für den Juden dahinte,” 202.

  
5
.
   
Ibid., 206.

  
6
.
   
Goldsmith,
The Inextinguishable Symphony
, 299.

  
7
.
   
Otto D. Tolischus, “Bands Rove Cities,”
New York Times
, November 11, 1938.

  
8
.
   
Goldsmith,
The Inextinguishable Symphony
, 204.

  
9
.
   
Geissmar,
Two Worlds of Music
, 84.

10
.
    
Ibbeken,
An Orchestra Is Born
, 17.

11
.
    
“Toscanini to Conduct Concerts of New Orchestra in Palestine,”
New York Times
, February 23, 1936.

12
.
    
Ibbeken,
An Orchestra Is Born
, 42.

13
.
    
Ibid., 18.

14
.
    
Lühe,
Die Musik war unsere Rettung
, 88.

15
.
    
Toeplitz,
Sipurah
, 59.

16
.
    
Sommerfeld, “Kein Bier für den Juden dahinten,” 209.

17
.
    
Ibbeken,
An Orchestra Is Born
, 19.

18
.
    
Ibid., 25.

19
.
    
Toeplitz,
Sipurah
, 35–36.

20
.
    
Lühe,
Die Musik war unsere Rettung
, 154.

21
.
    
Toeplitz,
Sipurah
, 34.

22
.
    
Clare,
Last Waltz in Vienna
, 177.

23
.
    
Ibid.

24
.
    
Sutton,
Bettelheim
, 124.

25
.
    
Cummins,
Dachau Song
, 77.

26
.
    
Lenk,
The Mauritius Affair
, 24–25.

27
.
    
Ibid., 42.

28
.
    
Ibid.

29
.
    
Beda and Mayer, “In the Eye of the Storm,” 26–27.

30
.
    
Lenk,
The Mauritius Affair
, 73.

31
.
    
Pitot,
The Mauritian Shekel
, 111.

32
.
    
Beda and Mayer, “In the Eye of the Storm,” 30–31.

33
.
    
Pitot,
The Mauritian Shekel
, 122.

34
.
    
Makarova,
Boarding Pass to Paradise
, 80.

35
.
    
Interview with Ze'ev Weininger, July 15, 2013.