The Jewish pianist who refused to play for the Nazis
When piano virtuoso Mosha Gebert defied an SS order to perform Beethoven’s music in a concentration camp, she was brutally tortured. A fictionalised account of her story is set to reveal her brave defiance to a new generation
MOSHA Gebert was a piano prodigy who had her fingers broken by concentration camp guards because she refused to play for them… yet never gave up her love of music even in the darkest of moments. As a teenager, Mosha had adored Beethoven’s work.
She mastered the great German composer’s technical arpeggios and octave jumps, and drew widespread praise for her harmonic dexterity.
Having become a teacher, she was with a pupil on the day the Nazis came to take her away. The student was shot and killed but Mosha was kept alive on account of her talent. Separated from her family, she was interned by SS officers in a concentration camp and ordered to perform Beethoven’s melodies for their pleasure.
But in an audacious act of bravery, Mosha refused to play a single note. Not even when threatened with savage beatings.
Enraged, her Nazi oppressors callously broke each one of her fingers in turn with their rifle butts. They beat and starved her, yet they could not crush her spirit. Until Mosha’s death, she found comfort listening to Beethoven’s symphonies in her head.
Nicola Pittam, a US-based Briton, read about Mosha in a book called The Beethoven Factor about how music had helped people who had been through horrendous things in their lives.
One of the interviewees mentioned how she had met Mosha during the war and been inspired by her indomitable spirit.
“I wouldn’t consider myself an emotional person but there was something about this story which really touched me,” says Nicola today.
“When I started thinking about the incredible spirit she must have had to rebel against the concentration camp guards I was bawling.
“So, I reached out to the widow of the book’s writer who had heard the testimony from one of his patients and I bought the movie rights. Sadly, even in his notes, there was no more information about Mosha.” Researching the story was tough; there was nothing out there at all other than the basic facts she already knew.
But Nicola was convinced Mosha’s spirit should live on. With this in mind, she wrote a script and then a novel, merging fiction with fact to tell the story of a very special woman and some of the memorable characters she may have encountered.
Nicola didn’t know which concentration camp Mosha had been in but decided to place the action in the Majdanek camp, near the town of Lublin, which like Auschwitz was in Poland but closer to the border with Germany.
She worked closely with the Majdanek museum to ensure her information about the camp was all factually correct. Majdanek stands out as the most intact of the former death camps because its commandant didn’t have time to burn down the gas chambers and crematoria in his rush to escape the Russian invasion.
In Nicola’s story, Mosha had a successful international career and is transported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Majdanek. The camp commandment Josef Hanke is a Nazi with a soft spot – a music lover, he has long been an obsessive fan of Mosha’s work.
B‘I want to show how rebels like Mosha could help camp inmates find dignity through music’
UT WHEN she refuses to play Beethoven’s Ode to Joy for him, they enter a battle of wills; she would rather die than have her musical spirit crushed in a place of industrialised death.
The weeks go on and it becomes clear that Hanke would rather torture the treasured pianist than kill her, and yet Mosha remains as defiant as ever. It is most likely the real Mosha died in a camp like Majdanek.
“There have been lots of stories set in Auschwitz but not many people have heard
of this camp and that is why I decided to set it there,” says Nicola.
“It was the first camp to have female guards, which was quite a rare thing. I have a character in the book called Elsa who is based on a real female guard from there – she was a very vindictive, awful woman.”
Elsa Ehrich was a slaughterhouse worker who volunteered for the Nazis and ended up becoming an SS guard. The guards at Majdanek were renowned for their savagery, even among the rest of the SS.
Canadian historian Doris Bergen, who has studied the Holocaust at length, has described how they “were known as sadists who enjoyed killing children in front of their mother and forcing the prisoners to engage in deadly sports”.
Nicola discovered that there was even a torture device nicknamed “the grand piano”, which she uses in the book. “It was a piano shape and they would tie people on to it and then beat them – I used it in a scene with Elsa and Mosha,” she explains.
It was at Majdanek on November 3, 1943, when the largest number of Jews were killed at one site in a single day. Angry about uprisings in other extermination camps and ghettos, Hitler’s henchman Heinrich Himmler ordered the elimination of all the Jews in the Lublin area in what became known as “Operation Harvest Festival”.
The Jews were separated from their fellow inmates and then forced to kneel beside trenches as they were shot. Loud music was played for hours to drown out the shots and screams. By the end of the day, 18,000 people had been killed.
Altogether, during its three-year existence, more than 130,000 people were murdered at Majdanek, the majority of them Jews.
Some of the guilty were caught, including Ehrich who was arrested by the British in Hamburg in 1945 and was hanged in 1948 after being found guilty of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
There were also some heroines within the camp that Nicola plays tribute to. Anti-fascist activists Matylda Woliniewska and Danuta Brzosko started an underground radio station. In reality, Radio Majdanek was a form of storytelling.
The women would give satirical and often heartfelt accounts of the horrors of what had happened during the day.
Speaking in the barracks, they would be fed information and would “transmit” twice a day. Each evening, the camp radio would end with the words: “Every day brings us closer to our freedom.”
SOME people may raise their eyebrows at the idea of a non-Jewish woman writing a fictionalised account of a real Holocaust victim but Nicola says she was simply determined that the world should know about Mosha’s story and camp life.
“I have tried to make it as authentic as possible and give a sense of what it was like being in one of these camps on a daily basis,” she says. “I also wanted to bring out how music was used by the Nazis and how difficult that must have been for musicians like Mosha. The Nazis would play it loudly at night to cover the screams of people being tortured.
“They would also force the prisoners to sing Nazi songs to demoralise them. They made music into an instrument of torture but I wanted show how rebels like Mosha could also help the inmates find dignity through it.”
She wrote the book before October 7 but prefaced it after the terror attacks which, despite being filmed by Hamas, were quickly subject to denials from antisemites as had the Holocaust before.
“People have always said, ‘Never again’ about the Holocaust but then suddenly something like October 7 happens and you see why it is so important for people to be aware of what happened,” says Nicola. “There are so many Holocaust deniers out there and no one should be allowed to forget what happened.”
She is proud to tell Mosha’s story by showing a defiant woman who never gave up, no matter what cost.
“As a writer I want to tell stories of strong, independent women and when it comes to stories from this period so many of them are about men,” says Nicola. “I think people need to know Mosha’s story – she fought the Nazis and stayed true to herself.”