Violins of Hope
Originally published, East Nashvillian
March, 2018
At first, he thinks his ears must be deceiving him, because only a few hours ago, he was roused from bed by armed soldiers, demanding he leave at once. He’s heard the stories about the horrors of the internment camps near the border, but there’s music. Surely the terrifying rumors in the ghetto cannot be true, because as he steps off the train, the young man hears music. There’s music here. Nearby, he finds a small quartet, two violins, a viola, a cello, playing Schubert. The young man loves music — in fact, he himself is a violin player. He considers lingering for a moment, but when he sees the SS guard nearby, he thinks better of it and moves on with his fellow travelers. Auschwitz can’t be what they claim, he tries to convince himself, because they have an orchestra.
“Musicians in the concentration camps were forced to play, once they were discovered as musicians,” says Nashville Symphony’s Steve Brosvik. “Orchestras were used to march people in and out of the camps at night. Some were forced to play during executions, when the trains were arriving, during dinner for the guards. Some people were quoted as saying, ‘It can’t be too bad. There’s an orchestra.’ There were all sorts of ways in which music was deceptively used.”
For two Israeli luthiers, father Amnon Weinstein and his son, Avshalom, preserving the memories and histories of these musicians — the Jews who were forced to play their instruments for the demented pleasure of their captors during the Holocaust — has become their life’s work. Their work began almost 30 years ago, when Amnon agreed to restore the first of many violins. Since then, dozens more have followed, and Avshalom has joined his father’s sacred task of preserving the dozens of Holocaust violins that have found their way to their shop. For Avshalom, the violins represent individual stories, the history of what happened to his people, on an intense, personal, and haunting level.
Telling these stories is his mission, and the violins are the medium through which he tells it.