Author: Inna Rogatchi

Memory Stones series 

Never Again what?  

There are two schools of thinking on the matter of the way of commemoration of our tragic Jewish past in the parts of the world where Jewish life has been eradicated during Holocaust so efficiently. According to one school, everything ruined should be restored, for the sake of historical fairness if not for any other sake. The representatives of the  other school are more pragmatic and they are asking: who will be praying in those restored giant synagogues? Is it good and proper if they will be staying empty? 

I can see the points in both opinions, actually. Normal human logic prescribes to restore the objects which were destroyed. But normal human logic also wonders on who will be going there. The fact is that that unspeakable sadness which has become the overwhelming, ever-lasting constant after the Shoah is still in effect, 75 years on, three generations after the end of the Second World War. Will it ever go away? No, it will not. Such is the character of the crime committed against the Jews in Europe. Michael Rogatchi (C). Shtetl Memories IV. Homage to Devilspiel novel by Grigory Kanovich. Mixed technique. 50 x 40 cm. 2020.

In those places which were not made if not entirely Judenfrei, but quite close to that, the vicious goal has been almost achieved to the chilling effect, with the consequences palpable to this day. Eradication of Judaism in the vast part of Europe has been successful to a stunning proportion. 

This change is qualitative. It has to be admitted and understood as it is. Without these irrelevant ‘never again’ chants. Never again what? It is never again already: never again Volozhin, Mir and all this myriad of great yeshivas will be teaching Jewish boys in Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, and all the places where they were flourishing. Never again there won’t be charming self-sufficient life streams in all thousands of shtetls all Eastern and Central Europe however modernised it all could be with time. Never again hundreds of Jewish professors will be teaching thousands of students all over in Poland, Germany, France and any other places. Never again Jewish musicians will bring that brilliance to their home countries all over Europe. Never again millions of Jewish people, substantially more than six million, will be living all over the places they lived during centuries enormously and indisputably enriching European economy, trade, science, industry, culture, everything. It. Will. Never. Happen. Again. Period. 

So, how to commemorate the life and the people which had been destroyed in all this unspeakable cruelty with all this barbarian enthusiasm? 

Der Vaser-Treger on the Vilna street  

On Monday, October 19th, 2020, a new sculpture was unveiled right on the street of Vilnius. The place is  the corner of  Lidos and Kedainiu streets, the one of the entrances into the Vilnius Jewish ghetto. Some people with whom I am speaking today, are calling it, fully organically for themselves, ‘former Jewish ghetto’. I understand what they mean. For me, the Vilna Jewish ghetto, as any other our ghetto anywhere in the world,  is always in present tense. I just feel like that. But there are some ghettos in which the air is an open wound. Vilna ghetto is just like that, for me, my husband and some of our friends. Romualdas Kvintas (C). The Water-Carrier. Bronze. 2010. Unveiled in Vilnius on October 19, 2020. Courtesy: Egle Kvintiene. With kind permission of Egle Kvintiene.

So, the  street has its new street-walker, the one casted in bronze, of a human figure size. His face is beautiful. He looks up. Many of us do. And did, always. Such a habit.  The shape of his figure brings us a hundred years back, at very least. There is a well-known photograph of a similar figure, alive man, from a Vilna street taken in 1922. The minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania, a known friend of Israel, Linas Linkevičius, has referred to that picture in his tweet about the recent event. There is another similar picture from Vilna taken five years earlier in 1917, which exists on the archival postcard in the collection at Beit Hatfutsot, The Museum of Jewish People in Tel-Aviv. Archive photo of water-carrier from Vilnius. 1922. Courtesy: The Library of Congress, the USA. No reproduction restrictions.

In a nice ceremony organised by the City of Vilnius and Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius, and supported by the Embassies of the Netherlands and Germany, gathered 30 people, the maximum permitted by the corona restrictions. The ceremony commemorated the second anniversary of the death of the author of that soulful sculpture, The Water Carrier, Der Vaser-Treger in Yiddish, Romas Kvintas, the outstanding Lithuanian sculptor who passed away so tragically and so early in October 2018. I have written about Romas and his input into the our commemoration process before, just after his death, in connection with his sculpture of Leonard Cohen which is also on the street of Vilnius. 

Romualdas Kvintas and his Way of Memory

In a paradoxical phenomenon, due to the number of reasons, the outside world beyond culturally sophisticated and advanced, but laconic behaviourally countries, such as Lithuania or Czech Republic, do not necessarily know enough about big artists and cultural figures there, as it ought to. Romualdas Kvintas, or Romas as he was  known to his family and friends, is one of those artists. He is widely known and appreciated in Lithuania, but not that much outside it as he should have been.  

There are millions of tourists who are coming to Vilnius annually, all of them are seeing Romas’ sculptures in bronze all over the city, and the same is the case outside Vilnius, all over Lithuania. Kvintas was a Master: top professional who worked very fast, but always  in a great fashion, a deep person, soulful thinker, he produced his sculptures with love and understanding. Rare love and rare understanding. His works are the rare case when a bronze and stone figures communicates with a viewer in a special way and conveys palpable emotions. Sculptor Romualdas Kvintas ( 953- 2018). Courtesy: (C) Egle Kvintiene. With kind permission of Egle Kvintiene.

Kvintas knew precisely not only what and whom he was sculpting , but also why. His tributes to the leading Jewish figures of Lithuania, which are – importantly – are also the leading figures in the entire Jewish heritage, are works of love, and for that, our appreciation of Romas Kvintas’ contribution in the process of living memory will last forever. 

In the case of The Water Carrier, Der Vaser-Treger, the story which was told to me by Romas’ widow Egle Kvintiene tells that Kvintas was working on a big project which included possible numerous sculptures, bas-relieves, and other possible sculpting creations which would be placed all over the territory of the former Jewish ghetto of Vilnius, as a sign of commemoration to the people and culture which had been whipped off from the Jerusalem of the North for good. 

‘Romas has finished the 3D model of this Water Carrier ten years ago, in 2010, and then, sadly, there was not enough interest to place the sculpture. There were various ideas regarding the suitable place, but it ended nowhere at the time. But now, fortunately, it is not just placed in the ( Vilnius) down-town, it stands at the place which was the one of the entrances of the  ( Jewish ) ghetto. You cannot make it more symbolic”, – Egle has told me. Indeed. 

Lasting Gift of Friendship

It was largely thanks to two notable personalities in Lithuanian culture, both close friends of Romualdas Kvintas that his charming, warm, evocative Der Vasser-Treger had been erected on the Vilnius street now, ten years after its creation and two years after its creator’s death. Romas’ widow Egle has told me with warm gratitude that former long-term principal of the Vilnius Academy of Arts Audrius Klimas  and well-known Lithuanian architect Alvidas Songlaila had put forceful effort in order to make the Water-Carrier standing in the street of the former Ghetto in Vilnius. 

The one of the leading Lithuanian designers, professor Audris Klimas himself has navigated me through the details of the story behind the erection of this new sculpture in Vilnius: it has to be finished, casted in bronze ( a very good work has been done by Martynas Gaubas and Rimantas Keturka ), and importantly, a prominent and suitable place has to be found, with getting all the necessary permissions and funding. “ Fortunately, we in Vilnius, as in many European capitals,  do have a special ongoing program for public art, and this is within this program that the City of Vilnius decided in support of our application of The Water Carrier project” – professor Klimas has told me. Good for the City of Vilnius and for its Mayor Remigijus Simasius who decided this way and who is consistent in  his policy in this regard. Ceremony of unveiling The Water Carrier sculpture in Vilnius. 19 October 2022. Photo : (C) Saulius Ziura. With kind permission of The Water Carrier project, Lithuania.

I personally would like to see more decisions like that in so many European cities which do have this program, and which do have so many reasons for statues like that, from Barcelona to Prague and from Paris to Krakow, but so far, we haven’t to see this kind of sculptures on the streets of those and so many other cities. So many others.   

Unveiled on the sad second anniversary of Romas Kvintas’ passing, his Water-Carrier stands now just next to a new stylish building resolved in the style of the historical epoch of the architecture of Vilnius downtown.  The building is authored by another close friend of Kvintas, known Lithuanian architect Alvidas Songaila. I was  told that Romas used to work with his architect friend closely in anything regarding many architectural decisions for his sculptures, during many years. 

I am thinking of that so special gift of friendship. What would we all do without it, without our friends? In the case of truly important for Vilnius work of Lithuania’s best sculptor, it is solely thanks to the love, memory and devotion of his friends  that his memory has been honoured in the way which has become a cultural and historical lasting commemoration. 

Inspiration In Parallel Worlds – and Time

Kvintas’s widow and his friends did share with me the background and source of inspiration for Romas while he was working on his Vaser-Treger. “ Romas got the inspiration for his sculpture from that famous Moyshe Kulbak’s  poem, Vilno”, – tells Egle. “ Yes, it was exactly from that canonic Kulbak’s poem that the personage for this sculpture came to Romas’ mind’ , – mentioned also prof. Klimas.

More precisely, Kulbak’s image comes from these lines that back in 1926 he dedicated to the city he loved:

You are a dark amulet set in Lithuania

Old grey writing – mossy, peeling.

Each stone a book; parchment every wall.

Pages turn, secretly open in the night,

As, on the old synagogue, a frozen water carrier,

Small beard tilted, stands counting the stars.

At the earlier stage of this special project, it was discussed a possibility to engrave the quote from Kulbak’s poem on the sculpture’s initially planned base under the figure in eight languages. Now, the Water-Carrier ‘walks’ straight on the street, so there is no basement, but anyone can read the whole story about the sculpture, its author, Kulbak and his poem in an efficient way of sharing QR-code on a smartphone from a wall nearby the sculpture.  

Moyshe Kulbak is the one of the leading names in the group of superbly talented Litvak poets, writers, artists and musicians from the first third of the XX century. He was the star even in such a star-made group, and his Vilno poem, the source of Romas Kvintas idea and inspiration for his Der Vasser-Treger, has become a canonic one, far beyond the circles of Yiddish and Jewish cultures. Poet Moyshe Kulbak ( 1896 – 1937). Open Sources Archive, The Water-Carrier Project.

After torturous interrogations, along with more than 20 other Jewish writers Moyshe Kulbak was murdered by the NKVD in Minsk on 29th October 1937. Almost all his family perished tragically in the Minsk ghetto a few years later. His wife was a prisoner of Gulag for over 10 years, and his youngest daughter Raya who was found by Kulbak’s survived brother after the Second World War in one of the orphanages in Soviet Union, is living with her family in Israel nowadays. 

There has been the most interesting twist of synchronised inspiration that has occurred with regard to this symbolic Der Vaser-Treger figure almost a century ago. Looking into some historical material, I found the poster of the performance played at the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York 86 years ago, in December 1936.  Poster for Der Vaser-Treger play performance at the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York, December 1936. Courtesy (C) American Jewish Historical Society. Permitted for reproductions in cultural and educational publications.

The play which is Der Vasser Trager, had the Water Carrier as its central personage, and there were even Lithuanian personages in it, like  Jewish merchant from Lithuania and some others. The author of the play was  Jacob Prager who lived before the Second World War  in Warsaw, in close proximity to Vilnius. According to my research supported by some YIVO documentation, Prager was known for  creating some of characters in his plays from the poems popular at the time. 

As Moyshe Kulbak wrote his Vilno poem ten years before the Prager’s play was performed  in New York, and as he was a cult figure among Yiddish intelligentsia both in Lithuania and Poland, Prager definitely knew that poem well. My guess is that his Der Vaser-Tregger theatrical hit in the mid-1930s in New York with the main character of Simcha Vaser-Treger was quite likely inspired by Kulbak’s poem, as well, the same as Romas Kvintas sculpture 80 years later. And what a painful irony turned it out to be the Water-Carrier’s name in the play. Simcha means joy in Hebrew, and it was very popular given name among our people always, before the Shoah yet more so. 

One of my great uncles, a renowned doctor, was Simcha too. He survived by hiding in France, but his son, also a doctor, as his father, did not. Simcha’s son Alexander who escaped just after the occupation from France to Switzerland in an extremely daring escape and who tirelessly treated his brethren in the DPC in northern Italy, was infected by typhus and died aged 29.

The resemblance of the Water-Carrier on the Yiddish Art Theatre poster of 1936 and the bronze sculpture on the street in Vilnius today is remarkable. Yet, Romas Kvintas never saw it. We all, Kvintas’ widow and his friends, and I and my husband  just love the fact of this incredible spiral of creative inspiration and humanity that whirled  around the globe and time in this special Water-Carrier small figure. 

Enlightening Memory and the Drama of an Orphaned Street

The first reaction that I have heard to the appearance of a bronze Jewish Der Vaser-Treger on the Vilna street from the residents of the city was from a 40-something IT-manager, who is not Jewish. He lives in the house on the street with a sculpture. This modern Lithuanian man has said: “ I am glad that every day I will be going to work and to return home walking next to this figure of that water-carrier. I am glad because the figure and everything that is behind it does remind us about the Vilnius where we all have come from. And this is enlightening memory”.  I was glad to see such a normal human reaction. 

Of course, I am fully aware of the situation regarding the ongoing struggle around recognition of guilt with regard to the local collaborators of the Nazis in Lithuania.  I know about the continuing efforts of those who strive to revise the factual history of the Shoah in Lithuania – and many other European countries – to insist that some of the collaborators should be regarded as national heroes by Lithuania. 

I know about smashed memorials to the victims of the Holocaust and about flowers and candles next to the outrageous memorial desks to the people who would be justly treated as military criminals in Germany and many other countries. I am in Lithuania often and am following the situation there closely. My and my husband’s families are Litvaks. We do care. 

Very much as in the case with the sculpture in the Vilna street, my thought was that there are so many European countries that had had all the reasons in the world to name the one of years to honour their noble Jewish sons and daughters, and to mint some memorable collectible coins as  so well deserved by never delivered tribute to their memories , from  to , and from to. 

The erection of the Jewish symbolic figure in the centre of Vilnius has revived the conversation about the topic which is still hot in Lithuania today. Some people, again, not Jewish ones,  have observed with this regard: “ Despite all those memorial plaques, at the Holocaust spots including ( like in Paneriai forest) , we still cannot admit our guilt. We just need conscience and courage to do that, but we still lack it”. 

What is important here is that those are reactions and thoughts of ordinary people, not politicians, not public figures. It is the reactions of these people which always tells about the real ‘temperature’ and conditions of a given society. 

There are also those from Lithuanian public today who have mentioned with regard to the Water-Carrier: “It is the message for those who want and who can understand”. Exactly so. At the unveiling ceremony of Romualdas Kvintas’ The Water Carrier sculpture. Photo: (C) Saulius Ziura. With kind permission of The Water-Carrier Project.

From that perspective, the words of Bonnie Horbach , the Ambassador of the Netherlands in Lithuania who was actively and kindly supporting the Water-Carrier project, the words that she said at the opening ceremony in Vilnius are the words of so natural human attitude:

“We all share the history of what happened here in the Second World War, and we all have a responsibility to investigate that history, even when it’s uncomfortable. Because it’s only then that we can understand what happened at that time. The statue of the Water Carrier is a constant reminder of the promise we made to acknowledge the inconvenient truth to ensure such a history will not repeat itself” ( Ambassador Bonnie Horbach, Opening remark at the Water-Carrier sculpture unveiling ceremony, Vilnius, Lithuania, October 19, 2020). 

Elie Wiesel’s one of the most often used phrases in his both speeches and writings was ‘and yet, and yet’.  This phrase said in Elie’s voice so many times still sounds in my head. When the subjects were those which dear Elie had to cover for over 70 years – just imagine – there always were ‘and yet, and yet’, and more of ‘and yets’. 

Remembering our dearest friend, and especially at the times when I deal with this ever present in our conscience – and sub-conscience – theme of my annihilated people, I am saying Elie’s  ‘and yet’  again when thinking on Vilna Street and its new inhabitant, the Water-Carrier, Der Vaser-Treger, Jewish man named Simcha, with all that piercing irony in that naming just before the WII that one just cannot invent. 

And yet, a few days after unveiling the sculpture, I received  another photo of it from my Lithuanian friends. Arunas Kuliskausjas (C). Yesterday in Vilnius. 2020. With kind permission of the author.

One of international Litvaks, dear friend, reacted in the way that resonates with every single Litvak world-wide, I am positive on that: “ Where are you, Jews? I brought some water for Shabbes dinner…”. 

The original capture of the work by its author, known Lithuanian photographer Arunas Kulikauskas, says it all, to me. It is simple: “Yesterday in Vilnius”. 

All the years after the extermination of the Lithuanian Jewry, the streets of Vilna were depressingly, very sadly blank-empty, despite any number of people walking there, for the Jews who remained. It was always the case, all the years from 1945 onward. There is such sadness from a dust of memories on the walls, in the air, under your feet, such a tangible  heart-ache  when you are walking there and looking into the inner court-yards, such helplessness, such never going away pain. This is the Jewish Vilna legacy after the Shoah,  permanently so.  

This sepia photo portrays it exactly. Before, until October 19th, 2020, these streets with its street lights were completely orphaned for us, Jews. They were orphaned for 75 years. From now on, at least our Simcha , Der Vaser-Treger is there, standing for all of us. More far more importantly, for all of them. 

Aciu, dearest Romas for thinking of us and making your Water Carrier as real, as one can make real a soul in bronze. Aciu, dear Audrius, Alvidas, Remigijus and all those who did help Romas’ Water Carrier to stand up there now, to make this street of Vilna a bit less orphaned. Just a bit.

Family Reflections on Yom HaShoah

The essay is an excerpt from Inna Rogatchi’s forthcoming book on her personal search into the dramatic saga of her Mahler- Rose-Bujanover family.

I grew up with those photos. The photos from distant beautiful fairy-like life: Tuileries Garden, Paris, elegantly dressed woman, her children surrounded by birds and flowers in a totally other dimension of life. Are those my uncle and aunt? And the elegant madame is my great-aunt? How interesting, I thought. It would be nice to speak with them, I thought. Which language should we use? My French is not so good, my German is inoperable although I do understand quite a lot of it because of Yiddish, but I do not think they have ever used it. Well, English will do then. We should be fine, I thought. Simcha Bujanover and Eleanor Rose family and their son Alex in Berlin in the 1920s and in Paris in the 1930s. (C) Inna Rogatchi archive.

I was late to speak with my great-aunt. I did locate her a few years after her passing in London in the early 1990s. Our family used to think that she was staying  in France after my great-uncle, quite famous doctor Simcha Bujanover’s death there in Aix-en-Provence the late 1970s. I was surprised to find out that today doctors in Europe are still using my grandfather’s brother Simcha’s book on gynaecology and paediatric studies published in 1921 in Berlin. 

I like to look at the only photo of Simcha we had, the one on which he is most probably in Zurich where he studied, with my other great-uncle Chaim Bujanover, before the start of the Great War. Back to Ukraine, in 1918 Chaim was decapitated by Ukrainian Petljura animalistic gang on his way home after the date with his fiancee. Chaim and Simcha ( sitting ) Bujanover brothers in Zurich, before the Great War. (C) Inna Rogatchi Archive.

By the time I established that Simcha’s wife Eleanor Rose-Bujanover had relocated to London, I could only gather parts of facts and memories about her and her family. And what an illustrious family it was. Performing violinist, Eleanor was a niece of Arnold Rose, famous violinist, the concertmaster of Vienna State Opera Orchestra and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for over fifty years and the co-founder and leader of the great Rose Quartet, eternal gem of the world music heritage. Arnold was married to Justine Mahler, the sister of great Gustav. Eleanor Rose in the 1920s in Berlin. Rose Family Archive.

The other co-founder of the Rose Quartet was Arnold’s brother Eduard, the one of the great cellists of his time. They were four great Rose brothers, coming to the top of the Western music from Jassy in Romania, all born Rosenblums. Jassy was quite a place to be born for an art-affiliated Jews. The place is known traditionally as the Cultural Capital of Romania, with a huge and thriving Jewish community there in the past, the community which needed as many as 127 synagogues in the second part of the 19th century. Jassi is known in the Jewish cultural history as the place of  both the first ever Yiddish newspaper and first ever professional Yiddish theatre appeared. Notably, brilliant Naftali Hertz Imber happened to write the text of Hatikvah while being just there in the course of his never-stopped journeys. The Rosenblum-turn-Rose family was moved to Vienna some seven years before that important fact of Jewish history.  The main reason for the move is understood to be a strong musical talent demonstrated by all four Rose brothers. In Vienna they mastered their talent to shining brilliance. 

In a significant inter-mingling of Rose and Mahler families, two of the Rose brothers, Arnold and Eduard married two of Gustav Mahler’s sisters, Justine and Emma. While Eduard and Emma were staying in Weimar, Arnold and Justine were  living and working in Vienna where Arnold was perceived as the most famous of great Viennese musicians, ‘The God of the Violin’, as Oscar Kokoshka called him.  Oscar Kokoschka (C). Still-Life. Watercolour. 1942. The artist created this work as his gift to Arnold Rose in 1942. Kokoschka’s inscription on the art work reads: “To the god of the violin, in your winter of exile”. Courtesy: The Gustav Mahler-Alfred Rose Collection , Music Library, University of Western Ontario, Canada – The Mahler Foundation.

Arnold’s aristocratic admirers collected money secretly to acquire a stunning gift for his 50th birthday, Viotti Stradivarius. What a celebration it was there and then in Vienna in 1910, to laud the great Maestro. It was the year of Gustav Mahler’s death, too. Mahler’s death masque was staying with Justine and Arnold for 32 years, all the years of Justine’s life and four more, until Arnold gave it to Mahler’s daughter Anna in London in 1942. 

After receiving that extraordinary Viotti Stradivarius,  Arnold handed his previous great instrument, Guadagnini violin built in 1757 that he bought in the Netherlands in 1924 to his daughter Alma to perform on it. 

My great-aunt Eleanor, the daughter of Arnold and Edward’s brother Alexander, was quite close to Arnold and Justine’s family and their daughter Alma, her first cousin. Alma probably is the most well-known member of the Rose-Mahler-Bujanover family today, due to a couple of films, plays and books about her, all rather subjective and biased, as it happened, sadly. She was a notable violinist before the Second World War, and died tragically in Auschwitz. She was 38 at the time. 

Her mom, Mahler’s caring sister, died six years before her daughter, in her own house, in Vienna. Justine died of heart attack that has stricken her immediately after the Anschluss, when her great husband was unceremoniously kicked out of his job, and they were about to be kicked off their superb house. Justine’s heart could not take it, but at least she did not witness what her husband tragically had to endure.  

Arnold and Alma were whisked from Vienna by two British highly placed gentlemen who were admirers of their music and who were simply noble people. But when in London, elderly Arnold and his daughter were practically left on their own in the extremely daring time from 1938 onward. Alma, trying to earn some money to sustain her elderly father and herself was going back and forth from London to the Netherlands to play anywhere possible as long as it was possible. One time in a banality of evil applied to daily life in early 1940s Europe, her trip to Amsterdam had happened to be one way. There was no way back. 

She was living in hiding, in three different places over two years between 1940 and 1942, with the noble help of Dutch people. Marye Staercke who  with her husband Paul was helping Alma with her second lodging, said in her interview to Richard Newman in a noisy cafe in Amsterdam back in 1983 simply and plainly: ”Our duty was to help anyone who did need the help”.   

I am a big proponent of documentary materials and in particular footage and recorded oral history. No transcript would relay personal recollections in the way a person does it by him- or herself. So listening to the only publicly accessible live interview of the person who hid Alma Rose for 16 months between August 1941 until December 1942 brings the sense of the events alive to me. 

As it had happened with many creative women during the Second World War with the Final Solution-in-progress, many of them got panicking and were trying to hide, to run, to disappear feverishly, being extremely nervous, quite understandably. In several tragic cases I know personally, it fired back. Alma’s case happened to be the one of them. She contacted the people in the Dutch Resistance and asked them to smuggle her to safety. In such operations, it was accustomed that somebody from Resistance would accompany the person on the run. In Alma’s case, it was a young Dutch man. After a very daring journey via France, with constant passing from one underground contact to another,  and never being sure of anything and anyone, both of them have finally boarded a train from Dijon to Switzerland. The safety was literally around the corner.

Alma and her travelling companion who all his remaining life was refusing to come with his real name publicly, were arrested on that train just before it would start to move, in December 1942. It is assumed that they were  denounced by the French agents of the Gestapo who infiltrated the French Resistance. As we know, it was quite wide and pretty efficient infiltration.  The last photo of Alma Rose taken by Paul Staercke in Amsterdam in December 1942 just shortly before Alma’s attempt to run to safety. Photo courtesy: Staercke family archive. The copy of the photo is shown in the Richard Newman’s Alma Rose. Vienna to Auschwitz book, 2000. Newman received the photo on his request from Marye and Paul Staercke in the 1980s.

After several weeks of harsh interrogations in the Gestapo prison in Dijon, in a known proceeding, Alma was transported first to Drancy, and was registered there as entering in January 1943 under the number 18547.  Before the Nazis were taken over the operation there (it was run for them by the French until the summer of 1943), terrified friends from the Netherlands tried every possible way to delay her further transportation from Dancy to the East, meaning Auschwitz. I saw the documents in which it is said that the French top musicians have informed famous and known as being in excellent terms with the Nazis pianist Alfred Corrot about Alma’s desperate situation hoping that ‘he would take it close to his heart’. There is no evidence that he did. 

As it is believed by her family and historians who were looking into  some episodes of that tragic saga, Alma’s destiny was sealed with Eichmann’s decision to take Drancy under the German control and operate it completely.  Eichmann chose his compatriot Alois Brunner to be his envoy there and his personal deputy at the Drancy in June 1943. The Nazis were repeatedly dissatisfied with how inefficiently French were doing the job, and insisted that the quota for the transports to the East should be fixed even if it meant to fill the transports with non-Jewish French whoever would be suitable for it: communists, Resistance members, Maki. 

Brunner acted in his and Eichmann’s ‘small clerk’s way’: in his new capacity, he arrived at Drancy in mid-June 1943, set up a small table in an unremarkable room there, and methodically personally interrogated all prisoners at the Drancy during four days, non-stop. With this round done, Brunner disappeared for some while. 

In three weeks sharp, Brunner sent Eichmann a report on completion of a new Judentransport with 1000 Jews, asking for Eichmann’s written approval of the order. Four weeks sharp from the day of his appointment to the position of Dancy Nazi supervisor, Brunner sent off Convoy Number 57 to Auschwitz with one thousand Jewish people in it. Alma was among them. The family believed that being Viennese, Brunner must have known who Alma Rose was.

Of that one thousand people on the convoy 57, thirty men and twenty two women survived. And that unremarkable Brunner, the butcher of Viennese and Salonica’s entire Jewry, plus an exterminator of the Drancy, lived until at least 2001 being well in Syria and Egypt, dealing arms and being military adviser to nice rulers of those countries in various periods of time. Why Brunner was allowed to live at least to 89 and to die of a natural cause is the one of the biggest mysteries, to me. 

Transported to Auschwitz, Alma was soon made the leader of the female orchestra there. She died under still unclear circumstances in April 1944. 

After her death, her bow with a black ribbon on it was on display on the wall of the female orchestra barrack in Auschwitz. During the days of mourning Alma, Mengele entered the barrack, went towards the wall, and stayed there looking at Alma’s bow for a long time. The players of the female orchestra who happened to be inside at the time, were astounded. 

* * *

In a few weeks after that weird episode, Elie Wiesel’s family, arrested and transported on Shavuot 1944, was brought to Auschwitz. It has been a month since Alma’s death. Elie did tell later on that he was surprised to see that the one of the top-officers whom he later identified as Mengele, was walking around the platform sorting the people unloaded from the trains – to the left and to the right, to be spared for the time being, and to be eliminated immediately, – by a bow. A violin bow!  – emphasised Elie being ever surprised on that odd scene . 

Elie was an aspiring violinist himself, he came to the death camp carrying his own violin, that’s why that bow in Mengele’s hands grabbed his attention and was imprinted in his memory for good. Elie’s violin was soon crushed physically and with a laugh by one of the Polish or Ukrainian capos when Elie being prompted by his father went to the Nazi who was responsible for an orchestra and asked to be taken in there. Ellie did not like to join that orchestra, he was not in a mood to play, to put it mildly. But his father who did care for him, especially after they were left alone after Ellie’s mother and young sister were murdered on the arrival, following Mengele’s gesture by that bow , was trying to save his young son. He knew that people taken to the orchestra were fed better, so it was a higher chance for his beloved son to survive. 

Elisha Wiesel begged his son to try to get himself to the orchestra. But the local capo did not believe that the youth could be an able violinist, and then, what a pleasure it was for him to crush a violin by his dirty boot. So, Elie had no chance to join the one of the Auschwitz male orchestras, but he did remember that bow in Mengele’s hand instead of his usual whip. Inna Rogatchi (C). Reading Elie Wiesel. Watercolour, Indian ink on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 40 x 40 cm. 2018-2019. Ghetto Waltz series.

It was an Alma’s bow. I am positive on that, due to the chronology of the events, Ellie’s first-hand detail, and the  Mengele and many Nazis’ perverted attitude towards the music. For some reason, not many people know till today that the favourite by Eichmann himself his own nickname among the  close circle of his lackeys was ‘Maestro’. That ‘Maestro’ loved to play a violin, or pretend to do so, and at some stage did have somebody’s Stradivarius to torment it. 

They did many behavioural details similar, those evils in human disguise. Long before Mengele and many others on that platform in Auschwitz were having a pleasure  tending a whip in their gloved hands, Hitler was known to walk with a whip on Berlin streets, to the terrified surprise of many there yet in early 1930s, according to the first-hand memories of the Bonhoeffer family members. 

I am sure that Mengele has decided the destiny of Elie Wiesel’s family, his mother and sister, as so many others, by pointing them towards the death with Alma Rose’s bow. I was tracing the Rose family’s violins for years, and was able to do it. Except that bow. That bow. 

* * * 

Alma did not take her Guadagnini on the run with her. She left it with a trusted friend in Amsterdam. The instrument came to that man with a hand-written notice from Alma: “Not to be lost”. Alma friends from her dramatic years in the Netherlands observed later on that she was attached to that violin incredibly.  She also wrote a will. As it happened, she did it a bit over 3 weeks before her arrest. It is a two-phrase will, literally, appointing two of her close friends, in succession, ‘to organise her funeral and to dispose of her belongings’.  The biggest treasure of which was her and her father’s Guadagnini. Inna Rogatchi (C). Alma Rose Guadagnini 1757 violin. Milan. Presentation material. (C).

That violin was brought to poor 82-year Arnold Rose, a great violinist of Vienna, to his London lodging, in the Autumn of 1945, with no words articulated. No words were needed. About the same time, he had also received from another person Alma’s wrist watch and her mother Justine Mahler’s precious pearls necklace. The decent woman who was with Alma at Drancy and whom Alma trusted her family belongings shortly before being sent on the Judentransport convoy 57, returned the Alma’s possessions to her friends in Amsterdam.

Arnold died soon after receiving back his own Guadagnini on which his daughter would not play anymore. 

I traced the life of that beautiful instrument built by a great Italian master in Milan in 1757. It is a story of its own. The Alma Rose Guadagnini violin, as it is known officially now, after being with Arnold’s pupil and great violinist, the concertmaster of Metropolitan, Felix Eyle from 1947 to the end of his life in 1988, nowadays is  a property of a well-known musician who prefers not to be named. The Arnold’s great Viotti Stradivarious built in 1709 nowadays belongs to the collection of the original rare instruments of the National Bank of Austria. Special committee there decides on their instruments’ loans to leading musicians. 

As it happened, Alma Rose should not have run in the first place, the same, as Nathalie Kraemer who made the same mistake at the same time in 1943 in France. The family who hid Alma exclaimed in despair soon after the end of the war: “Nobody ever came here to check on her! She would be safe if she would stay with us!” It is heart-wrenching to know it. And it was like that for Eleanor, Alma’s first cousin and completely devastated Arnold, her father who lost his wife, his beloved daughter, his work, his music, his house, his life. 

He also lost his brother Eduard who co-founded the Rose Quartet with him back in 1882. In Weimar, Eduard suffered the same destiny as his brother in Vienna: being the first cellist in the Weimar State Orchestra, he was kicked off his work at the first opportunity. He lived alone in their house after the death of his wife Emma in 1933, the other sister of Gustav Mahler, and was thrown out of it unceremoniously by the Nazis, placed in the infamous Ghetto House in  Weimar, and eventually taken to Theresienstadt in 1942. During his last years, over 80-year old Eduard was summoned to Weimar Gestapo many times for long humiliating interrogations. Somebody there have had a special pleasure to torture an elderly musical legend. Eduard Rose was murdered in Therezin in 1943. He was 83 years old.Eduard Rose, eminent cellist murdered in Tereziensdadt in 1943 in the age of 83. Courtesy: The Mahler Foundation.

The Rose Quartet was playing with phenomenal success for fifty five years. There never would be anything like that in the history of music. 

* * * 

I will not be speaking with my uncle Alexander either. In the photos, Alex looks exactly like my other uncle Leonid, the brother of my father Isaac. Alex became the doctor, like his father Simcha, my grandfather’s brother. He was a good, promising doctor and a brave young man. He ran from occupied Paris to Switzerland successfully, I found the traces of him illegally crossing the border, in several archives. As soon as the war was over, Alex went to one of the DCPs, Displaced Persons Camps, to treat thousands of people gathered after the Nazi camps there. He contracted the typhus from some of his patients and died in 1948. He was 28 years old. His mom, Eleanor Rose never came to terms with Alex’s death. She was positive that her beloved son could have been saved. “It was after the Shoah, after!” – she used to exclaim in defiance, according to the people who were talking with her years after the war, already in the 1980s. Eleanor Rose in her flat in London in the 1980s. Courtesy: Rose family archive.

* * * *

All these years after the war and piled with terrible news of fallen members of once brilliant musical dynasty, Eleanor was looking for one record. The record. She knew that father and daughter Rose, her uncle and cousin, recorded the elegant J.-S. Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor back in 1928. As it happened, it is the only known record of Alma Rose. She played on her Guadagnini for the record, and her father Arnold played on his Viotti Stradivarius. There are few records of Arnold surviving, and some of the Rose Quartet, but this record of Arnold and Alma of 1928 is the only one known.Arnold and Alma Rose in 1927 , a year before making that only known record of them playing together and only known record of Alma Rose. Courtesy: The Gustav Mahler-Alfred Rose Archive.

Eleanor tried every way and person she knew to find the record, with no much luck. It truly was – and still is – an extremely rare record to find. 

Eleanore Rose died of heart-failure in her ripe age in 1992. On the day of her funeral, the post arrived at her flat in London. In a small envelope, there was the record she was desperately looking for so many years. Austrian geologist  turned music historian and archivist and living in Germany, Wolfgang Wendel did find the record and sent it to Eleanor. It just did not make it in time.   Inna Rogatchi (C). Arnold & Alma Rose original record. Fine Art Photography Collage. 2012. Presentation material (C).

Mr Wendel kindly sent the record  to me too. Initially, I could not listen to it. It was too painful. For years, I’ve trained myself to listen to the unique record, bit by bit. 

What is also amazing is that my husband Michael, independently, did paint that very piece of Bach’s music which happened to be his favourite music by the great composer. Michael Rogatchi (C). J.-S. Bach. Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor. Oil on canvas. 120 x 100 cm. 2007. Private collection.

So now, that one melody and two violins, and so many human lives around it are living in its own world keeping on the memory of the part of my family alive – and remembered. 

On the eve of Yom HaShoah this year, we have made it a focus of our Special Art Bulletin of The Rogatchi Foundation Culture for Humanity Global Initiative. It can be read, watched and listened to here. 

My husband and I are very honoured to be able to maintain a memory of the brilliant musicians who did enrich the world’s culture in an important way and who were destroyed so cruelly in such matter-of-fact fashion of that diabolical Nazism machinery. 

I am honoured to remember them, but I feel so desperately sorry for them. As for everyone of our six, and most likely more millions, our Shoah toll, with more than a third of our murdered people still remaining nameless. So indefinitely sorry. Inna Rogatchi (C). Cloud View II. Fragment V. Crayons a encre, crayons Luminance on authored original archival print on watercolour 350 mg paper. 42 x 59 cm. 2019-2020. Ghetto Waltz and The Songs of Our Souls series.

No speeches would ever amend the damage and crimes committed. But a melody played by two people, a father and a daughter, superb musicians from a great family in the history of a world culture, played by two of them 92 years ago, almost a century back, is alive. Despite anything. This is a miracle which is the secret of Jewish survival. And this is unbeatable by any evil. 

I guess I was able to speak with my exterminated relatives, after all. It is an indescribable feeling. It is only up to music to relate it. 

The essay is an excerpt from Inna Rogatchi’s forthcoming book on her personal search into the dramatic saga of her Mahler- Rose-Bujanover  family. 

April 2020.