THE LIFE-SAVING VIOLIN OF AUSCHWITZ
As a young girl, Natalie Cumming
listened to her aunt’s harrowing accounts of surviving unimaginable horrors in brutal Nazi death camps – and how her most cherished possession became her only
chance of survival
Pulling her thin top around her for warmth, Rosa Levinsky picked up her violin bow and started to play. Her fellow musicians did the same, filling the air with sweet melodies. But they weren’t performing to an appreciative audience in a concert hall. They were at Auschwitz, witnessing a scene of horror. Thousands of terrified, starving Jews were spilling from trains. Men were herded away and mothers separated from their children by guards with ferocious dogs. Through it all the orchestra played on. They were officially there to ‘welcome’ the newcomers, but all knew their real purpose was to offer a false sense of security as the Nazis sent innocents to the gas chamber.
Rosa couldn’t allow herself to think of this as she played that freezing winter morning in 1942. She, like the others in that rag-tag orchestra, was a Jew who’d arrived at the notorious death camp in Poland on one of those packed trains. She’d survived so far only because she could play the violin like an angel. So she played on – for her life.
The deafening applause was beginning to fade as Rosa, then 28, made her way to her dressing room at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall on 9 November 1938. Two years previously, she’d been playing for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London when she was head-hunted by their German equivalent and offered the prestigious position of second violinist.
Rosa’s family had been concerned about her going to Germany because the Nazis were in power, but thought that her British nationality would keep her safe. And indeed, until that night, it had. But that evening would become known as Kristallnacht – when Nazis ransacked synagogues, smashed up Jewish businesses and arrested countless Jews. Until then, Rosa had been happy in Berlin, although she’d become increasingly concerned at the treatment of her people, who were forced to wear Star of David armbands to identify them in public. She had planned to return to her home in Leeds when her contract ended in December 1938.
But Kristallnacht ended such hopes. ‘As she walked home soldiers, seeing the Star of David on her arm, came to push her into the gutter,’ says her niece Natalie Cumming, 82, whose book The Fiddle tells Rosa’s story. ‘The Gestapo were already removing all the Jews from her block of flats. She was rooted to the spot in terror.’ An officer arrested her. ‘She pleaded that she was British but to no avail,’ says Natalie. ‘She was sobbing but clung to her violin because it was so precious to her. She didn’t know how important it would be.’ In fact, that instrument, made in 1883 and given to Rosa by her father, would save her life.
Rosa hauled the violin on to the truck alongside other terrified detainees. They were packed like sardines with no water or food as they travelled to their unknown destination. Eventually they arrived at Mauthausen in Austria, a labour camp where they were forced to toil on the ‘Stairs of Death’ – carrying huge blocks of granite up a steep hillside every day. Failure to salute guards or other trivial offences meant being forced to push a fellow prisoner to their death from the top of the stairs then waiting your turn.
Gradually the workers were starving to death, their feet and hands blistered, bodies broken. For Rosa, worse was to come. Hearing her playing the violin outside her hut one evening, one of the guards grabbed her and forced himself on her. ‘Then he spat on Rosa and walked away,’ says her niece. ‘She was bleeding and in great pain but there was nothing she could do.’
She left Mauthausen in 1940 and after another hellish truck journey found herself at