Violins of Hope (28 page)

“Look, Uncle Misha!” Motele exclaimed, pointing toward a cluster of bushes close to the Russians' trench. “Something is stretching along the ground like a blue snake.”

Uncle Misha quickly spotted the group of Germans in blue-gray uniforms stealthily crawling through the bushes toward the Russians. The partisans tried to warn the Russians, but their shouts were drowned out by the cracks of gunfire, the whistles of mortars, and the resulting explosions. They could not shoot the Germans, as their automatic weapons only had a range of two hundred yards.

“I'll run to warn them,” Motele volunteered.

“Don't talk nonsense,” Uncle Misha retorted. “The Germans will see you before you even get a chance to run halfway there.”

“They won't notice me. I'm small. I'll run hunched over and hide behind the dead soldiers and horses,” Motele responded. “Look! The Germans are already close. I'm going!”

Before Uncle Misha could stop him, Motele leapt out of the trench and darted toward the Russian officers. He zigged and zagged to avoid being targeted. Every twenty-five yards, he threw his body to the ground, waited a few seconds, and then took off running again. When Motele reached the Russian officers, they pulled him into their trench. Seconds later, they opened fire on the bushes where the Germans were hiding.

The Germans started running away. By then they had gotten so close to the Russians that there was nowhere to take cover. One by one, they fell to the ground dead.

The German artillery that had been bombarding the partisans and the Russians relentlessly since the night before changed tactics. They would cease fire every few minutes in an attempt to lure their foes out of their hiding places. After each temporary lull in the action, they would fire two dozen mortars into the area.

During one break from the fighting, Motele climbed out of the Russians' trench and started zigzagging back to the partisans. When he was a little over thirty yards away, there was a sudden burst of fire from a German machine gun that had been camouflaged on a hill.

Motele threw himself to the ground. He waited a few seconds, and then picked himself up.

He had not even taken another step when the machine gun fired again.

Motele screamed and fell to the ground.

Uncle Misha and Lionka ran over to Motele and pulled him back into their trench. They ripped open his bloody shirt and pants and found that the entire right side of Motele's body had been riddled with bullets. They tore off their own shirts and tried to fashion compress bandages that would stop the bleeding, but the damage was too severe.

“I wanted to be with you,” Motele explained weakly.

He grew weaker and paler with every passing minute. Uncle Misha held Motele in his arms. Silently crying, Lionka held Motele's left hand and stroked his curly black hair. Uncle Misha and Lionka were so consumed with grief that they barely noticed the German airplanes that had started dropping bombs near their location.

Motele opened his eyes.

“Uncle Misha, when I die, will I be reunited with my parents?” he asked, his voice almost inaudible.

“Don't talk nonsense, my dear child. You're not going to die,” Uncle Misha said, trying to console him.

Uncle Misha promised to carry Motele back to the field hospital, where he would be patched up and returned to the regiment. The sadness in Motele's eyes indicated that the boy knew he was dying.

“But when I die . . . will I be reunited . . . with my parents?”

Uncle Misha could not answer him. Tears streamed down his face. This was the first time he had cried in a year and a half. These were the first tears he had shed since his wife and his daughter had been killed during the Korets massacre.

Seeing Uncle Misha's tears, Motele stopped waiting for an answer.

The noise of the artillery suddenly fell silent. A deathly stillness permeated the embankment.

“I will tell . . . my parents . . . and Batyale . . . how I avenged them . . .” Motele groaned quietly.

He did not finish his sentence. His entire body stiffened. With a contented smile on his face, the thirteen-year-old partisan gave up his brave soul.

Uncle Misha ultimately underwent officers' training in the Soviet Union. He entered Germany as a captain in the Red Army—bringing with him Motele's violin—and was in Berlin when Hitler committed suicide. After the war, Uncle Misha worked at the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland before immigrating to Paris. In 1951, he moved to Israel, where he died in the city of Nes Ziona in 1957.

Motele's violin was passed down to Lionka, who had become a lieutenant in the Red Army. After the war, Lionka returned to Korets and shot one of the Ukrainians who had assisted with the murder of his mother and sister. Lionka was tried in a military court and sentenced only to a few weeks of duty in a disciplinary battalion.

Lionka immigrated to Israel with his father. He eventually gave Motele's violin to his own son Seffi Hanegbi, a tour guide in Israel's Negev Desert. For many years, the instrument sat between clothes and blankets in the back of Seffi's closet, collecting dust.

In the early 1990s, Seffi happened to meet Amnon, who was accompanying his wife Assi on a visit to the Negev. Seffi asked Amnon what he did for a living.

“I am a violinmaker,” Amnon replied. He had not yet started his work of restoring violins from the Holocaust.

“I will have to tell you a beautiful story someday,” Seffi promised.

In 1999, Seffi heard a radio program in which Amnon talked about the Wagner Violin and the other German instruments in his collection. This inspired Seffi to visit Amnon's workshop in Tel Aviv and finally tell him the story of Motele Schlein's Violin. Amnon pledged to restore the instrument, which still remained in the battered wooden case that Motele had used to sneak explosives into the storeroom of the Soldiers Club.

“It is a German instrument, very typical of what Jewish people had before the war,” Amnon recalls. “The violin was in good condition, because it was kept by the family the whole time.”

The only evidence of the instrument's astonishing odyssey from Volhynia to Israel is a fingerprint on the back of the violin where the varnish was stripped off by coming into contact with alcohol. From the position and location of the damage, Amnon has surmised that at some point a drunken German at the Soldiers Club tried to grab the instrument, perhaps to play it himself.

Although Amnon would completely refurbish many of the other Violins of Hope, he decided to leave Motele's instrument relatively unchanged. He made only minor repairs, replacing just the pegs, bridge, and soundpost to make the instrument playable for special occasions. Using prewar materials that he had inherited from his father, Amnon was able to restore the violin to its original condition.

Seffi subsequently donated the violin to Yad Vashem with the stipulation that it be available for performances. It has since become a permanent feature in Yad Vashem's Holocaust History Museum, in the Resistance and Rescue Gallery, which is dedicated to those who defied the Nazis. Motele Schlein's Violin can be found alongside not only displays about rescue attempts and partisan camps, but also an authentic Schindler's List.

Sixty-five years after Motele played his violin for the last time, the instrument came alive again on September 24, 2008. In a historic concert at the foot of Jerusalem's Old City walls, a twelve-year-old boy named David Strongin was handed Motele Schlein's Violin. He joined a dozen other children performing on the Violins of Hope in front of an audience of three thousand. Fittingly, the young musicians and the audience came together at the end of the concert for a moving rendition of “Hatikvah.”

 

 

A
s the world's leading authority on violins of the Holocaust, Amnon is frequently contacted by descendants of Holocaust victims looking for instruments that were once owned by their families. One day in 2008, Dov Brayer brought Amnon a picture of his brother Shevah. The faded black-and-white photograph was taken at the Brayer home in Lwów, Poland, in the mid-1930s, before Shevah was taken to a concentration camp and killed. In the picture, Shevah holds a violin that Dov hopes to reclaim someday.

“This was a professional violin, not just a simple Klezmer,” Amnon deduced after looking at the photo. “And it was made in Poland.”

“Yes, yes,” Dov confirmed excitedly. “It was given to my brother as a gift by a Polish noblewoman. He was a concertmaster. We believe he played it at the entrance to the Janowska concentration camp near Lwów. That is where he died.”

Amnon paused for a moment in the memory of yet another violin virtuoso whose life and career were cut tragically short. “We can never understand what happened in the Holocaust,” he finally concluded. “But if we can understand what thoughts went through the minds of the people who played music at the entrances to the camps . . . maybe we can understand something. These instruments are a testimony from another world.”

Amnon took out a magnifying glass to inspect the photo even further. “The scroll of this violin is extraordinary,” he said, pointing to the decorative dog's head that had been carved into the top of the instrument. “I've never seen anything like it.

“The chances of finding it are one in ten million,” Amnon warned Dov. “But thanks to this unique scroll, at least it's not impossible.

“And if I do find this violin,” he continued, “it will be played in a huge concert.”
⁸⁵

The Brayers are just one of thousands of Jewish families who lost their violins during the Holocaust. Some instruments were sold for pittances when their owners became desperate for money to feed their families or to emigrate. Others—like the violin that Feivel Wininger left behind in Gura Humorului—were abandoned when their owners were forced from their homes for arrest or deportation. Still others fell into new hands when their owners died in ghettos and concentration camps, as was apparently the case with Shevah Brayer's violin.

Many instruments—like the Amati that Feivel played in Transnistria—were stolen by neighbors, local authorities, and German officials. After initiating a comprehensive campaign to eradicate the Jews in Europe, the Nazis launched a corresponding initiative to destroy all Jewish cultural and economic activities. This started with the confiscation of millions of valuables such as art, jewelry, books, and religious treasures. Over the course of World War II, a special team of Nazi musicologists seized hundreds of thousands of music books, as well as tens of thousands of musical instruments, manuscripts, and music scores from Jewish musicians and music businesses.

Only a small fraction of these stolen items were ever returned to their rightful owners. Many of them were destroyed during the war. The majority of the objects that did survive remained in German hands. Some looted artifacts were given to German soldiers as rewards for their service. Other war booty was reallocated to German families as compensation for belongings that were destroyed during bombings. The items that were ultimately uncovered by the Red Army were shipped to the east. They would never be seen again.

The Western Allies largely failed in their attempts to return the cultural artifacts to their legal owners. It was difficult to track down survivors and witnesses. Records of the stolen instruments were often inaccessible, incomplete, or missing altogether. Those who had just survived the Holocaust were not likely to still have bills of sale, certificates of authenticity, or any other documents that could identify and prove ownership of a rare instrument. Even when there are photographs of owners like Shevah Brayer holding distinctive violins, such records are useless if the instruments themselves remain missing. It is impossible to know whether those violins no longer exist, or whether they remain concealed in secret collections.

Records of the Netherlands' Ministry of Finance include sixty reports of instruments that were stolen from the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation. The claims include valuable violins by Amati and Guarneri as well as instruments by lesser makers that were confiscated by the Germans when their owners were taken prisoner or fled their homes. Most of these thefts were never investigated. Many of the reports lacked descriptions of the instruments that would be detailed enough to easily distinguish that particular instrument from the thousands of others just like it in Nazi collections. Other instruments were simply not valuable enough to pursue. Only one report is marked “Returned to the Netherlands.”
⁸⁶