Auschwitz survivor who played in camp band and later fought hate with music

Esther Bejarano, who has died in Hamburg aged 96, was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and, later, a campaigner against anti-Semitism and racism. After the Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews in Germany in November 1938, Esther’s parents sent her to a Zionist training centre in preparation for emigration to Palestine. But in 1941, German police arrested all the teachers and students in the Zionist camp, sending them to the Nazi Landwerk Neuendorf forced labour camp, not far from Berlin.

From there, Esther Bejarano was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the death camp in German-occupied

Poland, where she arrived on April 20,

1943, after five days in a cattle car.

On her arrival, along with the other prisoners, she was greeted by a German officer saying: ‘‘Now, you filthy Jews, we will show you what it means to work’’, and she was forced into hard labour, gathering and carrying heavy rocks.

About the time of her arrival in Auschwitz, Esther Bejarano learned that musicians were needed for the newly established

Ma¨ dchenorchester von Auschwitz, the women’s orchestra of Auschwitz. ‘‘I introduced myself to the organiser and said that I could play the piano [but she told me that] ‘we don’t have a piano here’,’’ she recalled in a later interview. It was then suggested that, if she could play the accordion, she would be invited to an audition.

Viewing the accordion keyboard to be the same as the piano’s, Bejarano, who had never played the accordion before, said she could play the instrument: ‘‘I was instructed to play a well-known German song, I knew the song

. . . it was like a miracle . . . I played the song

. . . I was accepted.’’ The song was Du hast Glu¨ ck bei den Frau’n.

The orchestra’s role was to perform, particularly, when trains arrived with Jews on board. ‘‘You knew [the new arrivals] were going to be gassed,’’ she said, ‘‘and all you could do was stand there and play . . . we played with tears in our eyes . . . the new arrivals came in waving and applauding us, but we knew they would be taken directly to the gas chambers.’’

When Bejarano was in Auschwitz, the International Red Cross searched for mischling (mixed race) prisoners – to save them, since according to Nazi laws a person of mixed Jewish-Aryan ancestry should not be deported to extermination camps.

As Bejarano had a Christian paternal grandmother, friends at the camp convinced her to report to the Red Cross as a mischling, so she could get out of Auschwitz and ‘‘tell people what we’ve been through in the camp’’.

In September 1943, she was transferred to the Ravensbru¨ ck women’s concentration camp in northern Germany. In April 1945 Bejarano managed to flee while on a death march, a forced evacuation of prisoners westward as Soviet troops closed in. A few weeks later, she played her accordion, surrounded by Allied troops, as a picture of Adolf Hitler was consumed on a bonfire.

She was born Esther Loewy in Saarlouis, Saar Territory (then French-controlled Germany), one of five children of Rudolf, a teacher, and Margarethe Loewy. Young Esther grew up in a musical house where her father encouraged her to learn music and play the piano, in which she excelled.

By early 1935 Saar Territory was returned to Germany as a result of a referendum administered by the League of Nations and, gradually, the Loewys became second-class citizens, stripped of their civil liberties.

In 1938 the local synagogue was destroyed, and Esther could no longer go to school. Like other Jews, the Loewys had to wear the Star of David. Later, she would say of this period: ‘‘One’s best years as a youth are those between 16 and 20. But what kind of a youth did we have? None, really. A horrible youth.’’

In November 1941 Esther’s parents were shot, after their deportation to the Kaiserwald concentration camp near Riga (now in Latvia). One of her sisters, Ruth, was able to find shelter in Switzerland, but she was eventually deported back to Germany, where she would die in Auschwitz on December 1, 1942. ‘‘This is so fateful,’’ Bejarano said later. ‘‘I came to Auschwitz in April 1943 and if she had lived, I would have met her there.’’

After the war, Bejarano emigrated to Palestine, then under British Mandate. She studied singing in Tel Aviv and, as she was so good at it, toured Israel and even travelled abroad as a singer.

In 1960, finding life in Israel difficult, she immigrated with her husband, Nissim, and children to Germany. At first, she struggled to integrate into German life. Postwar Germany had few Jews, and many older Germans wanted to leave the past behind. ‘‘When I saw people who looked a bit older than me,’’ she recalled in an interview, ‘‘I always wondered whether they had perhaps been the murderers of my parents and my sister.’’

Bejarano fought the demons of her past with music; with her two children she set up a band to play Yiddish melodies, and, later, she sang with the hip-hop band Microphone Mafia, which used music to spread a message of anti-racism to German youth. ‘‘We all love music and share a common goal: we’re fighting against racism and discrimination,’’ she would often tell her audience.

She co-founded and chaired the International Auschwitz Committee. A popular public speaker, she would often visit schools to talk to German children about her Holocaust experiences. A tiny woman, not even 5ft, she was full of energy and spirit.

‘‘You knew [the new arrivals] were going to be gassed and all you could do was stand there and play ...’’