Music has always been a large part of my life. I recall, when I was perhaps six years old, my mother would play songs on the piano from “Blanche Neige et les sept Nains” (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), and my sister and I would sing along.
It was a miracle that while my father continued going to his office after the “Aryanization” of his business with his Jewish star on, he was not arrested and taken away to an internment camp between May 1941, when Jews were first rounded up, and the end of July 1942, when we fled.
In 1940, or thereabouts, my mother had to go to a hospital in Paris, close to where we lived. We were told, my sister and I, that she had an appendectomy. We later learned that, in fact, she had suffered a miscarriage. Thinking of it now, if she had had that baby, we would never have been able to escape, to cross the demarcation line illegally and hide as we did. The baby might have obliged us to stay in Paris. We would have been rounded up in August 1942—that was when the Gestapo came to get us, but we had escaped on July 31, 1942. The miscarriage was sad but also a blessing in disguise. My mother didn’t talk about it until many years later.
The current stories of migrants around the world remind me of World War II and the millions of Jewish migrants, desperate to escape from Europe, with nowhere to go because no country was willing to accept them. We all know about the Kindertransport (my mother’s cousins were on it in 1938, and I have distant cousins and their descendants who made a home in England).
On May 19, 2014, there was an op-ed piece in The Washington Post written by Michael Gerson titled, “Teaching the Holocaust.” A boy who had his bar mitzvah was the grandson of four survivors. One of the grandfathers had said, when the boy was born, “Hitler, you bastard, I beat you.”
One of my best friends, Jeanne Rosenthal—the viola player in one of my quartets that performs on International Holocaust Remembrance Day—told me of an exhibit in Cleveland, her hometown, of violins that were found after World War II. Those violins had belonged to Jewish musicians whose lives ended in the gas chambers after the Germans stole their instruments.
Born in Paris, France, in 1935, Jacqueline fled with her family to the Vichy-controlled southern region of France, where they lived together under surveillance for the remainder of the war.
When I grew up in Paris, after we survived World War II, there was not much talk at home about what we had endured. I knew that all of our close relatives were dead, I no longer had grandparents or cousins or aunts and uncles. I envied my school friends who went for lunch and holidays at their relatives’ homes.
Watch videos and read articles about the Holocaust and the conditions that made it possible.
