Activist dies
Death camp survivor who used music to fight antisemitism passes away at
96.
Esther Bejarano ,a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp who used the power of music to fight antisemitism and racism in post-war Germany, has died at 96.
Bejarano died peacefully early Saturday at the Jewish Hospital in Hamburg.
Born in 1924 as the daughter of Jewish cantor Rudolf Loewy in Frenchoccupied Saarlouis, the family later moved to Saarbruecken, where Bejarano enjoyed a musical and sheltered upbringing until the Nazis came to power and the city was returned to Germany in 1935.
Her parents and sister Ruth eventually were deported and killed, while Bejarano had to perform forced labor before being sent to Auschwitz-birkenau in 1943. There, she volunteered to become a member of the girls’ orchestra, playing the accordion every time trains full of Jews from across Europe arrived.
Bejarano would say later that music helped keep her alive in the German Nazi death camp in occupied Poland and during
the years after the Holocaust.
“We played with tears in our eyes,” she recalled in a 2010 interview. “The new arrivals came in waving and applauding us, but we knew they would be taken directly to the gas chambers.”
In a memoir, Bejarano recalled her rescue by U.S. troops who gave her an accordion, which she played the day American soldiers and concentration camp survivors danced to celebrate the Allied victory over the Nazis.
Bejarano emigrated to Israel after the war and married Nissim Bejarano. The couple had two children, before returning to Germany in 1960. After once again encountering open antisemitism, Bejarano co-founded the Auschwitz Committee in 1986 to give survivors a platform for their stories.
She teamed up with her children to play Yiddish melodies and Jewish resistance songs in a Hamburgbased band they named Coincidence, and also with hip-hop group Microphone Mafia to spread an anti-racism message to German youth.