Violins of Hope (7 page)

The Nazis quickly began turning their attention from humiliating and terrorizing the Jews to expelling them from Austria. On April 1, all of the prominent Jewish leaders in Vienna were sent to the Dachau concentration camp. In May and June, an additional two thousand Jewish intellectuals who had been specifically targeted by the Nazis were arrested, beaten, and placed on three trains to Dachau. This included Erich Weininger, who arrived at the concentration camp on June 3, 1938.

One of the first Nazi concentration camps, Dachau was established in March 1933, just weeks after Hitler came to power in Germany. The camp was constructed on the site of an abandoned World War I munitions factory ten miles northwest of Munich. Initially built to accommodate five thousand German inmates, its original detainees were political prisoners such as communists and social democrats. The ranks soon grew to incorporate other factions that the Nazis deemed undesirable, including homosexuals, Roma (Gypsies), and Jehovah's Witnesses. When Erich arrived in Dachau, he was among the first non-Germans to be detained in a concentration camp. He was also among the first to be imprisoned simply for being Jewish.

Erich was arrested by the Austrian police at the end of May along with several hundred other Jews, including the famous psychologist Bruno Bettelheim and the composer and conductor Herbert Zipper. They were taken to a detention center in a converted school on Karajan Street—named after the personal physician of Emperor Franz Joseph I who was the father of the already famous conductor Herbert von Karajan. They expected to be released within a couple of hours or days, as many of them had been after previous arrests. But this time, they would not be allowed to return home.

After a few days, the Jews were loaded into police vans and taken to Vienna's western train station. When the van doors flew open, they were greeted by SS guards who ordered them to run. The Nazis savagely struck the prisoners with fists, clubs, whips, rifle butts, and bayonets. They corralled them through the station and toward a train, dragging anyone who stumbled by the hair. Those who resisted were shot. Those who survived sustained serious injuries. Bettelheim was savagely beaten in the head and stabbed with a bayonet. Zipper suffered severe facial trauma and two broken ribs.

It took thirteen hours for the train to travel the three hundred miles to Munich. The trip was continually interrupted for sessions of torturous exercise and brutal beatings. The passengers were ordered to sit up straight with their hands on their laps. They were forced to stare straight into blinding lights that hung from the ceiling. Several faltered during the night and were beaten or shot to death. When the train arrived in Munich the next morning, the Jews were packed into cattle cars—150 in each car—for the final leg of the train ride to Dachau.

Upon their arrival in the concentration camp, the prisoners were stripped of their remaining possessions, shaved, and dressed in ill-fitting striped uniforms. Prisoner life was governed by very strict rules. Breaking them would result in severe punishment. “Everything in Dachau is prohibited,” the camp commandant announced. “Even life itself.”
²⁵
Although Dachau was technically an internment center and not a death camp, its prisoners were subjected to starvation, beatings, torture, and grueling forced labor. During the Holocaust, at least 31,591 of its 206,206 detainees died from malnutrition, exhaustion, disease, suicide, and murder at the hands of the SS guards.

Although the prisoners were closely watched most of the time, the guards often left them unsupervised on Sundays. Some took advantage of their free time to socialize with other captives or read newspapers. Others wrote to their families. They were allowed to send two short letters each month. Herbert Zipper did something quite extraordinary: he formed a clandestine orchestra.

Shortly after arriving in Dachau, Zipper had met several excellent musicians, including a number of outstanding string players. He had also heard that there were one or two violins and just as many guitars that had somehow been brought into the camp. These discoveries inspired Zipper to form a makeshift ensemble. Given the low number of instruments available in Dachau, it is very likely that Zipper's orchestra included Erich, who had managed to bring his violin with him from Vienna. To complete the ensemble, Zipper convinced two instrument makers in the camp wood shop to secretly build instruments out of stolen wood. He even persuaded an SS guard to smuggle in some violin strings.

Zipper's fourteen-piece orchestra performed in a latrine building that was still under construction. Their repertoire consisted of well-known classical works as well as music that Zipper composed in his head each week during forced labor. He wrote out the pieces late at night, making sure to accommodate the odd instrumentation and the varied skill levels of the musicians, when he was supposed to be cleaning toilets. Zipper notated the music on strips of paper that fellow prisoners would tear from the margins of Nazi newspapers and painstakingly paste together.

There was only room in the unfinished latrine building for twenty to thirty people at a time, so the orchestra played in shifts of fifteen minutes to allow as many audience members as possible to rotate through the performances. The prisoners filed in quietly and remained in conspiratorial and awed silence throughout the brief concerts. In a tightly controlled concentration camp like Dachau, where such pursuits were strictly forbidden, the musicians and the audience members risked torture or even death for participating in these unsanctioned concerts.

In addition to providing a source of emotional comfort for the detainees, the music served as an inspirational reminder of the humanity that Dachau had taken from them. When they listened to the music, they were no longer weak, demoralized, and humiliated. They were dignified and strong, united in their spiritual resistance to Nazi persecution. If only for fifteen minutes a week, they were surrounded not by the ugliness of the concentration camp but by the beauty of music.

In 1938, the Nazis were still more concerned with expelling Jews than with killing them. Their solution to the “Jewish Question” continued to be coercing Jews into emigrating. They were even willing to release concentration camp prisoners who agreed to leave the country. Most of Dachau's detainees, especially those who promised to surrender their property and move away, were released after several months. More than 1,200 others, including Weininger, Bettelheim, and Zipper, were packed into four cattle cars and transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp on September 23, 1938, to make room in Dachau for an influx of Jews from the German annexation of the Sudetenland. A convoy of 1,100 Jews followed one day later.

Established five miles north of Weimar in 1937, Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps on German soil. Like Dachau, Buchenwald was designed as an internment facility and not specifically a death camp, as Auschwitz would later become. But Buchenwald's harsh conditions—far worse than those at Dachau—nevertheless claimed the lives of 43,045 of its 238,980 prisoners during the Holocaust. Many died of starvation, while others were literally worked to death under the Nazis' brutal “Extermination Through Labor” policy. Still others succumbed to disease or were simply murdered by the SS guards.

Erich brought his violin to Buchenwald, but there was no possibility of participating in performances—even clandestine ones. Immediately upon arriving, the prisoners were told that gatherings of any kind were strictly forbidden. If any of them witnessed anyone breaking those rules, they were to report it immediately or risk being punished themselves. Such punishment typically involved being stretched out on a whipping post and beaten on the back twenty-five times with a whip or a club.

When Erich arrived in Buchenwald, there were about ten thousand prisoners, living in unbearable conditions. Unlike Dachau, which had been systematically clean and orderly, Buchenwald was filthy. There was no running water until January 1939, forcing the detainees to go for months without bathing or brushing their teeth. The appalling hygiene was exacerbated by the nonstop rain and the unpaved roads, which covered everything and everyone with slimy mud. The toilets were four large ditches, twenty-five feet long, twelve feet wide, and twelve feet deep. Since there was nothing to hold on to while they were relieving themselves, exhausted prisoners often fell or were thrown by SS guards into the foul trenches, where many of them died.

The situation in Buchenwald grew even worse on November 10, 1938, when the prisoner population was instantly doubled with the addition of ten thousand Jews who had been arrested on Kristallnacht. Five additional barracks had been built in the preceding weeks, but they were hardly enough. Each night, eight hundred detainees were locked in barracks built for four hundred. Many died of suffocation overnight. Others died of starvation from only receiving half of the already paltry food rations. Still others succumbed to typhus when an epidemic ran rampant through the cramped and unsanitary camp.

Throughout their incarceration in Buchenwald, the prisoners were subjected to various forms of torture. This included “sport” sessions in which the SS guards would force a few of them to exercise until they died of exhaustion. Sometimes the torture was inflicted on the entire camp at the same time, as when the guards would make the detainees stand at attention in the freezing cold. On December 14 and 15, 1938, the captives stood from 5 p.m. to noon the next day as punishment for two prisoners who had escaped. Several dozen of the flimsily clad detainees died of exposure while countless others, including Bettelheim, suffered frostbite as the temperature dropped to 5 degrees Fahrenheit overnight.

At this time, the Nazis were still promoting mass emigration as a comprehensive method of ridding Germany and Austria of their Jewish populations. In August 1938, Adolf Eichmann established the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna to expedite the expulsion process. Jews who were able to pay a hefty Reich Flight Tax and other fees were allowed to emigrate, but only after surrendering all of their wealth and possessions to the Nazis, and only if they agreed to leave the country as soon as possible. Even those in the concentration camps were released if third parties paid the fees and obtained the requisite paperwork on their behalves. The 9,370 Jews who were released from Buchenwald in the winter of 1938–39 included Zipper, who returned to Vienna on February 20, 1939, after his family secured the documents necessary to immigrate to Uruguay. Bettelheim was released on April 14, after obtaining a passport, visa, and ticket to the United States.

Zipper and Bettelheim were fortunate to secure their departures in early 1939. By that August, the Nazis were no longer issuing exit permits to male Jews between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. Within the next two years, they would put a stop to all Jewish emigration. The very last group of Viennese Jews who were allowed to leave Austria departed for Portugal in October 1941. By then, the Nazis had concluded that the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was not the expulsion but the extermination of the millions of Jews who remained in Nazi-occupied Europe. One year later, the Nazis would order all Jewish prisoners remaining in Buchenwald to be transferred to Auschwitz.

The Jews who were able to emigrate prior to 1940 were assisted by numerous international relief organizations. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and England's Council for German Jewry each provided funds for one hundred thousand or more Jews to leave Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. The German Emergency Committee, established in London by Quakers, rescued another six thousand Jews.

Among those whom the German Emergency Committee freed from the concentration camps was Erich, whose sister-in-law was a Quaker who had emigrated from Vienna to London one year earlier. First, she was able to pressure the Nazis into releasing her husband—Erich's brother Otto—and then she got them to free Erich. Thanks to the Quakers, Erich was released from Buchenwald and was allowed to return home to Vienna. From there he was able to leave Nazi-occupied Europe—becoming one of the last Jews to escape the Holocaust.

Erich's father Karl, conversely, decided not to leave. He was reluctant to undertake the arduous process of emigrating, especially since he was among the many German and Austrian Jews who were convinced that the Nazis would not be in power for very long. His decision would prove to be fatal. One day, Karl wore an overcoat on top of the jacket onto which he had sewn his Star of David. In the cold Vienna winter, he had briefly forgotten that Jews were required to visibly display the yellow badge at all times. A close family friend who had often dined at the Weiningers' home informed on the elderly Weininger to the Nazis. Karl was arrested, taken to a police station, and pistol-whipped to death.

By the end of 1939, half of the 525,000 Jews who had been living in Germany before the Nazis took over had left the country. Half of Austria's 200,000 Jews had also fled. Some went to North America, South America, Eastern Europe, or Asia. Others, like the musicians who formed the Palestine Orchestra, had immigrated to the Holy Land.

By that time, however, there were fewer and fewer places left to go. The countries that had been accepting Jews since 1933 had become overwhelmed with refugees. Some began instituting strict quotas. Others closed their borders altogether. Even Palestine ceased to be an option for most Jews after Great Britain responded to ongoing Arab unrest by issuing the White Paper of 1939, which greatly reduced the numbers of Jews who could immigrate there. Such limits placed severe restrictions on Jewish immigration just at the time when European Jews needed asylum the most.

There may be no story that encapsulates the frustrating impracticalities of the emigration process better than the saga of the MS
St. Louis
. The ocean liner left Hamburg on May 13, 1939, with 937 immigrants bound for Cuba, where most planned to stay only until their American visas came through. The majority of the passengers were German Jews, including Günther Goldschmidt's father Alex and uncle Helmut. Many of them had been imprisoned alongside Erich in Dachau and Buchenwald. When the
St. Louis
arrived in Havana, its passengers learned that the Cuban landing permits for which they had paid inflated fees had been revoked. Cuba was closing its doors to immigrants. By this time, one of the original passengers had died of congestive heart failure, leaving 936. Of those, 28 passengers who had paid five-hundred-dollar bonds were allowed to disembark, while the remaining 908 passengers were denied entry.