THE CANTOR, THE NAZI COMMANDANT, THE EXECUTION, THE LIFETIME OF TEARS
Why Moshe Kraus wept when they hanged the Beast of Belsen for his war crimes
Moshe Kraus survived the Holocaust because he sang so beautifully — an escape from death that, at age 95, still wrecks his heart.
Late one December afternoon, he’s at the dining room table overlooking the Rideau River, hands folded on the linen, when he asks wife Rivka for a tissue. And he begins, stepping back in time to the place of tears.
Born into a family of Hasidic Jews, a cantor for 70 years, Kraus was a child prodigy who at age nine travelled around towns in old Czechoslovakia, returning home from concerts with pockets full of money, which he had no interest in.
But this is not the story sealed in sorrow.
In 1944, at age 22, he found himself in Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi concentration camp in what is now northern Germany. Inevitably, he began to sing with a repertoire of uplifting songs that made him popular in the barracks, where slaughter and starvation were everyday occurrences.
One day, the camp commandant, Josef Kramer — the notorious Beast of Belsen and a terrifying-looking SS officer — overheard Kraus singing.
He ordered the young man brought to his lavish house, about 10 minutes’ drive from the camp, the following Sunday. When Kraus arrived in his ragged pyjamas, he found Kramer dining alone in his underwear.
He gave the starving young Kraus some leftover food and asked if he knew the work of Joseph Schmidt, a famous Austro-Hungarian tenor popular in Germany. He did, luck would have it, because he’d studied his technique under one of Schmidt’s instructors. During dessert, it was time.
“Sing!” the commandant ordered. So Kraus sang a song in the Schmidt style, in German, looking up with some apprehension at the final note.
“Would you believe it?” recalled Kraus. “This murderer, he could kill a man like nothing, he cried.”
And so for months this became their routine. He would sing for Kramer every Sunday, a grim perk that spared Kraus from the genocide, which he says was occurring in batches of exactly 1,000 Jews. And he knew, many days, some other Jew was dying so he could live and sing for an evil, hideous man. (About 50,000 people, including Anne Frank, died in Bergen-Belsen.)
“I was only waiting when would come my day when they would burn me.”
(This turn of events was so critical to Kraus that he titled his autobiography, just released this year, The Life of Moshele Der Zinger, How my Singing Saved my Life, a reference to his camp nickname in German.)
When the camp was liberated in 1945 by the British, Kraus was so weak, weighing but 75 pounds, he fell into a coma and was hospitalized until he regained his strength. Upon his release, he said, he was notified Kramer, quickly convicted of war crimes, was about to be hanged.
And the old camp commandant wanted Kraus present.
“He walked out very proud,” Kraus recalled last week of the execution in a prison yard, the big-time Nazi about to die ingloriously for the fallen Reich. “He smiled, I smiled back. I bent my head. They hanged him. I couldn’t take it. I cried.”
The room is very quiet now and outside the sun has gone down. And he is shaking a wee bit, his voice a little wobbly, this tiny man, short of five feet, with the magnificent white beard and the milky hazel eyes.
“He saved my life. OK, he was an unbelievable man. But he saved my life. I cried and God forgive till today why I cried.”
Rivka, his wife for 66 years, has handed him a tissue. He wipes his eyes, the same eyes that belonged to Moshele Der Zinger 75 years ago that saw his saviour hanged. “If you have other questions, you can ask me.”
Other things were posed, but there was not much else to say. The Nazis killed his parents, four siblings, 32 aunts and uncles and more than 100 of his cousins. Shedding a tear for the Beast of Belsen perhaps proved that all that horror and misery — who would not feel an ocean of vengeance? — had not killed everything human inside Moshe Kraus.
And yet, now an old man, he still seeks forgiveness for his sympathy.
He prevailed, of course, going on to have a fabulous run as a cantor. He was the chief cantor for the Israeli army right after the war, a cantor in Budapest, Bucharest, Antwerp, Johannesburg, Mexico City and Ottawa, the details of which fill a book. He forged and nurtured a friendship with Elie Wiesel, a one-time vocal student, and the author of Night, a foundational book in Holocaust literature. He has rubbed shoulders with prime ministers and been an honoured guest at many an event.
He has often spoken to groups about his Holocaust experiences, taking seriously his role as witness.
“I can’t seem to completely numb those horrendous feelings from the Holocaust,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “I just can’t believe it still hurts after all these years. There is no answer as to why.”