This is the best I can do on the history of the owner of the violin.
1932 Young Frederick Zoref was traveling through Europe playing his violin and teaching. By 1933, anti-Jewish violence in Germany and throughout Europe was on the rise. Frederick decided to change his surname to Zorin, which sounded more Russian than Jewish in an attempt to escape attention and to be able to continue performing. Frederick was teaching violin in Riga when German forces invaded and occupied Riga in the summer of 1941 at this time Frederick’s violins were confiscated except for one that he lent out to a friend. To survive Frederick began work as a slave laborer for the Gestapo. Jews were being moved to the ghetto in the so-called Moscow suburb of Riga and thousands of Jews living in the Riga Ghetto were taken to the Rumbula forest, shot and buried in mass graves. Among them were Frederick’s parents.
Frederick and a number of other laborers were deported to Burggraben where he was able to work as a laborer in the shipyards until the Germans decided to move all the prisoners ahead of the Allies advance.
At the new location, Frederick was recruited into one of the many groups that were sent out on death marches. The purpose of these marches was to remove evidence of crimes against humanity committed inside the camps and to prevent the liberation of German-held prisoners of war. The marches were brutal; if you fell out of the march, you were left for dead or shot, you were lucky to be shot. By now, Frederick was not sure that he would ever get his life back; he was sure he would die here.
Frederick’s group made it to Gotentov, where they were liberated on March 10, 1945, by the Russians, after which Frederick, with the help of the Jewish underground, was sent to a Soviet repatriation camp in Poland where with the help of the Jewish Underground he was able to escape and made his way through Poland to Bavaria which was part of the American militarized zone in south Germany. Frederick spent nearly two years waiting to immigrate to America.
I got the violin after my grandfather passed. Then, one day a few years ago, just before the world shut down, I was driving home from work and heard a voice on the radio talking about Violins of Hope. I pulled off the road and called the number. Within a few days, I was invited to a concert, and I brought the violin with me as an offering.
My grandfather had borrowed the violin from Frederick but was never able to get it back to him. ;-(
Cynthia Freese