Never again is now – these violins say: we are here

In July 1942, thousands of Jews were arrested in Paris and brought to cattle wagons in concentration camps in the east, most of them to Auschwitz. In one of the crowded trains was a man who held a violin in his hand. When the train stopped somewhere in France, the man heard voices: a few men who worked on the rails. The man shouted on the train: »Where I go now, I don’t need a violin. Here, take my violin so that she can live! “

The man threw his violin out of the narrow window. She landed next to the rails and was lifted by one of the French workers. The violin had no life for many years. Nobody played on her, nobody had a use for her. Years later, the worker died and his children found the abandoned violin in the attic. They told a southern French violin maker the story they had heard of their father. The violin maker knew about the “Violins of Hope” and passed on the violin to this institution, where it can be played again.

Such stories can be told about almost all of the now over 70 instruments of the “Violin of Hope” collection, which the violin maker Moshe Weinstein put on. Weinstein managed to escape from Warsaw to Tel Aviv in 1938, where he became one of the leading violin maker of Israel. After the Shoa, many instruments were given to him who once heard Jewish musicians, but also Roma musicians or intellectuals persecuted by the Nazis, from Poland, the Soviet Union, France or Italy. It was only Weinstein’s son Amnon (1939–2024), he also violated violinists, started restoring these instruments. 53 violins, a viola and a violoncello from this collection sounded last Monday on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in a memorial concert in the Berlin Philharmonic. Vladimir Jurowski, the Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra Berlin (RSB) and the Rias Chamber Choir designed this concert.

The string instruments saved from the Shoa were made to sound by musicians from the RSB in the premiere of Berthold Tuercke’s “Violence”. Again and again solo elegies on instruments such as the »pike violin«, which handed over the violinist Fanny Hecht, who came from Bielefeld and traveled to Holland, were handed over to her neighbor when she was deported to Westerbrok and later to Auschwitz, where she was on September 17, 1943 was murdered. On the inside of the violin it says: “Antonius Stradivarius Cremona, Faciebat Anno 1743”. Individual stories can be told about all of these instruments – and that they were made to sound in Berlin is above all a “sign against forgetting”, as Amnon Weinstein once described the concern of his instrument collection.

So some musicians play on violins with artistically built into the body built in the body, which were built for klezmervirtuosos; Some of them were murdered in mass shootings in the forest of Ponar, where German SS members and Lithuanian collaborators killed almost 100,000 people between 1941 and 1944. A French violin belonged to ZVI adhesive, who was a member of Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra founded in 1936; Another bears the inscription “Dedicated to the victims of Babyn Jar, September 1941”. The great-grandfather of RSB chief chief Vladimir Jurowski is also in the gorge of Babyn Jar. On September 30, 1941, he was murdered by the Nazis together with tens of thousands of other Jewish residents.

All 55 string instruments of the Weinstein collection get a solo within the composition. Poeming miniatures can be heard, mostly with a motivic line from the traditional Kol Nidre, the evening prayer to Jom Kippur: “A small second and third, often downwards, with the big third,” said the composer. Alternating Jiddish poems by Abraham Sutzkever (whose “VI Azoy?” Delanded “Lost Causes”, the Psalm 137 and texts from Weinstein’s documentation on her album “Lost Causes”, have an alternation. The fate of the instruments (it would have been a good idea to project the texts into the hall).

This creates a small oratorio, which, however, cannot really convince overall – but this can be neglected in view of the history of the instruments and the memory of the victims of National Socialism. “These violins say: We are here. Forever! «That was the important message of this concert, the second part of which was fantastic: the RSB played works by Gideon Klein and Mieczyslaw Weinberg, each editing for string orchestras: from an early age a trio, from Weinberg that from Jurowski and Steffen Georgi for string orchestra Equipped string quartet No. 5 B major op. 27, an initial performance.

Gideon Klein was brought to the Theresienstadt concentration camp two days before his 22nd birthday. There he organized music events, supervised orphans, gave music lessons before he was spent in the Fürstengrube outdoor camp in autumn 1944, where he had to do forced labor in the coal mines. Immediately before the Auschwitz concentration camp was released, Gideon Klein was shot by the SS. He was 25 years old. Klein had given his Theresienstadt compositions of a friend and co-feder, who survived the camp. The manuscript of the string trio is kept in the Terezín memorial today.

»All three sentences of the Gideon Klein trio use Moravian folk melodies. Nevertheless, home joy does not want to arise. Bitonally distorted and rhythmically broken, the folk melodies in the corner sets breathe illusions without illusion, but also character strength, hardness and pride, «writes Steffen Georgi in as always excellent (and free distributed, Hello Berlin Philharmonic!) Program. An oppressive work.

This applies no less to Weinberg’s composition. Born in Warsaw in 1919, the young piano virtuoso fled to the Soviet Union in September 1939 in front of the German Wehrmacht, which Poland had attacked. His parents and little sister were murdered by the fascists in the Trawniki camp.

His string quartet No. 5 composed Mieczyslaw Weinberg in 1945, it is a work of unconditional contemporary: full of grief, fear and despair, as can be heard in the large elegy of the first movement. Then a wonderfully strolling, almost ironic humoresque with many Jewish melodies, abruptly interrupted by a grim, which is reminiscent of his mentor Schostakovich, which drives into the hall with brutal force. In an “improvisation” and a “serenade”, Jurowski and the strings of the RSB found unspeakable melancholy, for mourning for the murdered family members and to fear of forgotten.

A big evening, a deeply felt memory of the victims of National Socialism. “Never again!” This is not a phrase in this concert, but an urgent mission. And you would like to hear works by Mieczyslaw Weinberg in Berlin concerts more often.