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http://www.accordions.com/news.aspx?d=06-Aug-2021&lang=de&s=17878
http://www.accordions.com/news.aspx?d=06-Aug-2021&lang=de&s=17878
06-Aug-2021
by Rob Howard
|
 Esther Bejarano, Auschwitz survivor and musician, was born on December 15th, 1924 and died on July 10th, 2021, aged 96.The item below was an excerpt from The UK Times on August 5th, 2021. During her life, Esther Bejarano gave poignant talks about her time as an accordion player with the Auschwitz women’s orchestra. In her first month as a prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp in Poland, 19-year-old Esther Loewy was forced to do hard labour in a quarry. It nearly killed her. She then heard about a women’s orchestra that Maria Mandl, the SS-Helferin [helper] in charge of female prisoners, had recently started, essentially as a propaganda tool for visitors and camp newsreels. Every Sunday they would perform a concert for SS officers. Those chosen to play in the orchestra were given extra food as well as their own bed. They were also excused hard labour. As this looked like her only chance of survival, Loewy approached the prisoner who was leading the women’s orchestra of Auschwitz and told her that she was a pianist. There was no piano in the camp she was told, but there was an accordion. Loewy lied that she could play one. For her audition she was asked to play Bel Ami, a popular German song. “I didn’t have any problems with my right hand, because I knew how to play the piano and I immediately found the keyboard, but the bass is on the left, and only thanks to the fact that I have a good ear could I find the right tones,” she recalled. The orchestra played upbeat music as prisoners left the camp to work and when trains full of Jews arrived. “You knew that the new arrivals were going to be gassed and all you could do was stand there and play. We played with tears in our eyes,” Esther Bejarano, as Loewy later became, recalled. “The new arrivals came in waving and applauding us, but we knew they would be taken directly to the gas chambers.” After six months in Auschwitz, she was transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Then, in the spring of 1945, she escaped from a death march along with several other prisoners. A few weeks later she was rescued by American troops and celebrated the Allied victory in a market square in Lübz, Germany. An American GI handed her an accordion, which she played as American soldiers, Soviet troops and camp survivors danced around a burning portrait of Hitler. Many survivors who had played in the camp never played an instrument again, but a life without music was not something that Loewy ever considered. She studied singing, joined an award-winning choir and taught children to play the recorder. Bejarano, a small, energetic woman who was not even 5ft tall, continued to perform well into her nineties, playing almost 900 concerts around the world. |