Violins of Hope (11 page)

On August 26, 1945, almost six years after leaving Vienna for Palestine, the refugees returned to Haifa. This time they would bypass Atlit and proceed directly to their predetermined housing arrangements. Some would stay with family members who were already in Palestine or would settle into one of the collective agricultural communities. About four hundred of them would move into houses that had been built for them in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and the northern coastal city of Nahariya. A few dozen who had opted to return to Europe were taken to a transit camp south of Gaza.

Erich was among the immigrants who settled in Nahariya. He renewed his career as a butcher, but still continued to play the violin that had accompanied him on his astonishing odyssey from Vienna to Dachau and Buchenwald, from Bratislava to Palestine and then Mauritius, and finally back to Palestine. He would often invite a pianist and a drummer he had met in Nahariya over to his home for intimate evenings of playing traditional Austrian folk music and waltzes.

Erich returned to Austria a few times for brief visits. He gave serious consideration to murdering the former friend who had informed on his father, but was talked out of it. “Don't do it,” Erich's friends pleaded with him. “They'll throw you in jail for the rest of your life. You've already spent enough time in prison.”
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Erich died in 1988, at the age of seventy-six. His violin was passed down to his son Ze'ev, who lived in Germany, and his daughter Tova, who still lived in Israel. It stayed with Tova until 2012, when she started considering selling it. Her son took the violin to Tel Aviv to see how much the instrument was worth. He quickly learned that there was only one person who could appraise it: Amnon Weinstein. The violin was damaged from being played outside in Mauritius's tropical heat and had little monetary value, but Amnon immediately recognized the instrument's historical significance. He agreed to restore the violin for free. All he asked in return was permission to maintain Erich Weininger's Violin as one of the Violins of Hope.

 

 

G
ünther and Rosemarie Goldschmidt, the performers who founded the Palestine Orchestra, and Erich Weininger were among the last Jews to leave Nazi Germany. The country sealed its borders on October 23, 1941, prohibiting any other Jews from emigrating. Shortly thereafter, the Nazis began transporting Jews to camps designed not just to incarcerate and torment Jews, but to kill them by the thousands.

One of the musicians who suffered from this persecution was Henry Meyer. Henry was born in 1923 into an affluent and musical family of Jewish merchants in the culturally rich city of Dresden, Germany. He received his first violin at the age of five and began taking lessons with one of the best violin teachers in the city. He quickly established himself as a child prodigy by playing chamber music alongside his accomplished parents as well as professional musicians.

Henry's idyllic childhood ended when Hitler came to power in 1933. At the age of ten, Henry was expelled from his school and banned from social clubs, and was even stripped of his bicycle and pet dog. He was also forbidden to take lessons at the conservatory or the State Opera's orchestral school. He took a few private lessons from the concertmaster of the opera until the Gestapo forced his new instructor to stop teaching him.

Henry's parents wrote to family members in the United States asking for help with immigrating to America, but the relatives did not have the financial resources to vouch for a family of four. There was also the problem of America's immigration regulations. Henry, his younger brother, and their mother fell under the German quotas. Henry's father was subjected to the Polish quotas, since his hometown had been part of Poland when he was born. Securing permission to immigrate to the United States was difficult enough for Germans. For Poles, it was almost impossible.

When Henry was fifteen, he was invited to appear as a soloist with the small orchestra hosted by the Jewish Culture League in Dresden. Once again, fate intervened. The concert was scheduled for November 9, 1938—Kristallnacht. Instead of performing that night, Henry was arrested and sent to Buchenwald, where he was imprisoned alongside Erich Weininger. Henry was released a few weeks later when he was presented with the possibility of leaving the country. As with his family's attempt to emigrate in 1933, these plans never materialized.

In 1939, Henry moved to Berlin, where he was accepted into the culture league orchestra. In addition to quickly establishing himself as an exceptional performer, Henry became the self-proclaimed “Benjamin of the orchestra,” as at the age of sixteen he was its youngest member. Henry also quickly grew close to fellow orchestra musicians Günther and Rosemarie Goldschmidt, often playing chamber music with the young couple.

When the Jewish Culture League was disbanded in August 1941, Henry was required to report to the employment office for labor service. Worried about his future as a violinist, he asked for work that would be easy on his hands.

“I have something for you,” the bureaucrat responded. “A company that makes Sanitary Articles.”
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Much to Henry's embarrassment, these “Sanitary Articles” were condoms for the German army. Henry was assigned to work in the Fromms Act factory, where Jewish entrepreneur Julius Fromm had invented the rubber condom before being forced to sell his lucrative business to Hermann Göring's godmother. Henry's job was to liquefy the rubber with a hazardous mixture of industrial chemicals. He worked for twelve hours a day without the benefit of the gas mask and extra milk rations that the Aryan workers received to combat the effects of the toxic fumes. To make matters worse, the pre-vulcanized rubber proved to be anything but easy on his hands.

In early 1942, Henry returned to Dresden to be with his family during the impending deportations. He and his brother were forced to work at the Zeiss Ikon factory, making devices that became parts of triggers for time bombs. Because they were providing useful labor, the brothers were not chosen to accompany their parents when the elderly Meyers were transported to the ghetto in Riga, Latvia, that March. Their mother died in Riga. Their father survived the ghetto and a death march to Dachau. He would die there in 1945, two months before it was liberated.

In March 1943, Henry and his brother were marched from Dresden's Hellerberg Ghetto to the Neustadt train station, where they were packed into cattle cars. Starving and cold, they rode for several days in a cramped and foul-smelling wagon. When the train stopped, they had no idea where they were. Voices from outside of the car commanded them to leave everything behind and get off the train. Through a hatch, Henry could see the steam of another locomotive. In the background was a sign for a place Henry had never heard of: Auschwitz.

The largest and most notorious Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz was a large complex in Poland that actually included several camps. The oldest was the Auschwitz Main Camp, which was built after Nazi Germany's defeat of Poland in 1939, by Jewish slave laborers from the eponymous town of Oświęcim. The Auschwitz Main Camp was a harsh penal complex where thousands of mostly Polish political prisoners were regularly tortured and executed. In 1941, the Nazis began constructing a camp that was much larger and even deadlier, a little less than two miles from the Auschwitz Main Camp. They named this second site Birkenau, after the German name for one of the Polish villages that had been razed to create the 15.5-square-mile camp. As the Birkenau extermination camp expanded, separate subcamps were developed for men, women, Roma, and Czechs. Gas chambers were erected to assist with the mass murders of the detainees. Crematoria were constructed to dispose of their remains. The Auschwitz III concentration camp was erected in 1942 to provide forced labor for the Buna chemical plant in nearby Monowitz. Over time, the Nazis built forty-five more satellite camps, mostly for forced labor.

Daily life in Auschwitz was so brutal that most of the prisoners died of exhaustion and starvation within weeks. After assembling for an early morning roll call, the detainees would march out of the camp for an entire day of torturous labor before dragging their fatigued bodies back to camp for an evening roll call. At the whim of the SS guards, additional roll calls could be held in the middle of the night, at which time the inmates were forced to stand at attention for hours in the rain and snow. Anyone who moved was sent to the gas chambers, as was anyone who appeared too sick or weak to continue working. Between those who were killed immediately upon arriving and those who perished in the camp, an estimated 1.6 million people, mostly Jews, died in Auschwitz.

Amateur violinist Jacques Stroumsa was deported to Auschwitz on April 30, 1943, as part of a transport of 2,500 Jews from Thessalonica, Greece. The Jews were herded into German cattle cars that were overcrowded with men, women, and children. Most of the deportees were forced to stand. They were given no food and just one bucket of drinking water for the entire car. They were also given a tub that was to serve as their communal toilet. From time to time, the locked doors would be opened from the outside, but only long enough to empty out the tub and refill the bucket. During a stop near Vienna, Jacques and another young man were chosen to help an SS officer unload some gold and jewelry the German had stolen in Greece. Other than that brief respite, all of the deportees remained in the packed and poorly ventilated cars for the entire eight-day journey to Auschwitz.

The transport arrived in Birkenau early in the morning of May 8. The doors were thrown open and the Jews were ordered out of the train. As the deportees frantically climbed down, they were blinded by a harsh spotlight and deafened by shouting voices and cracking whips. Disoriented, Jacques held on to his pregnant wife with one hand and his violin with the other, until the beatings forced him to let go of both. The Jews were lined up and quickly directed to a “selection,” where an SS officer directed each of them to the left or to the right. The officer pointed 815 healthy men and women between the ages of fifteen and fifty to the left. Although they did not know it at the time, being steered to the left meant that they had been selected for work details. The remaining 1,685 sick and elderly Jews were sent to the right. They would be taken to the gas chambers and killed that day.

While his wife and parents were sent to the right, Jacques and his brother were directed to the left. They were taken to an SS officer who interrogated them about how old they were, what they did for a living, and what languages they spoke. The officer was gauging how useful each new arrival would be to camp operations.

After Jacques and his brother were marched into Birkenau, they were briefly reunited with a doctor they had known in Thessalonica. The doctor, who had arrived just a few days earlier, pulled Jacques aside to tell him the truth about what happened to those who were selected to go to the right. “By now, your wife, your parents, and her parents have already been gassed, and soon they will be burned in the ovens of the crematorium,” he whispered. “The young people brought to the camp have a chance, a small chance to survive, but only provided that they never become ill.”
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Getting sick would result in no longer being useful. Being useless would result in being sent to the gas chambers.

The first stop in Birkenau was the “sauna,” where the detainees were tattooed with their prisoner numbers. Jacques was given number 121097. The hair on their heads and bodies was shaved off. They were sent to a shower that fluctuated in temperature between freezing cold and boiling hot. Then they were given blue-and-white-striped prison uniforms with yellow and red Stars of David over their left breasts to mark them as being Jewish.

The shape and color of a detainee's badge indicated why that person was imprisoned and defined one's place in the Auschwitz hierarchy. Jews who wore Stars of David were at the bottom of the ladder, alongside the Roma, who wore brown triangles. Above them were the Poles and Russians, who wore red triangles as political prisoners. At the very top were German criminals, who wore green triangles. The higher a detainee was on the social scale, the more likely it was that he would be chosen for functionary positions within the camp administrative system. These positions included block elders who oversaw the prisoner barracks and capos who oversaw work details. In return for maintaining order by inflicting terror on their fellow detainees, the functionaries received better food and better living conditions, and therefore better chances of survival.

Jacques and the surviving members of his transport had just entered their new barracks and received their bunk assignments when their block elder ordered them to assemble at the doorway.