Violette's mother insisted that she take her violin lessons.
“Study my darling, you never know what can happen in life.”
Violette's parents were not musicians. Hungarian immigrants from Transylvania, they had settled in Le Havre where in a café, the Guillaume Tell, a female orchestra performed.
Did Violette's mother think of the orchestra in that café when she repeated this sentence to her many times? Was it a way for her to find a job for her daughter if her studies were not to lead her to a satisfactory situation? Or did she imagine a possible new imposed emigration where the language of music could open up new horizons for her? Was it a premonitory feeling? Violette in retrospect has often asked herself these questions.
What she knew for sure after the war was that this violin saved her life.
Under which circumstances? Well, no one could have imagined that.
A Hungarian employee in need sometimes came to work at the workshop. He had a violin and played willingly, with a preference for Dvorak’s Humoresques. Violette's parents offered their daughter to learn music theory and the violin. She studied for seven years with her teacher, Mr. Henri Lhomel, 2nd violin of the orchestra of the theater of Le Havre. The family’s income was modest, and very often Antoine, Violette’s father, a tailor, paid for the violin lessons by making indoor jackets for the teacher.
The war came. Despicable men wrote on her parents’ shop the word “JEW.” They had to leave.
Her father made a fictitious sale and gave his shop to the father of his non-Jewish apprentice with the promise of recovering it after the war. Many did so; few regained their property.
They kept their promise and Violette took over the shop after the war.
Violette left Normandy, her friends, her teacher and her violin. Her childhood and carefreeness disappeared forever.
It was first in Paris where they were forced to wear the yellow star, then Lille, where Uncle Michel lived, that they joined, tore off their yellow star, and became illegal.
It was there, on July 1, 1943, that they were denounced and arrested by the Gestapo. All three deported together, they were separated upon arriving at Auschwitz. Violette was never to see her parents again.
She was, like all those who arrived in this hell, undressed and shaved. She was given a few rags for all clothing, she was tattooed on the left forearm. Number 51937.
One day, when she was in quarantine, she found herself during roll call next to two young women who had arrived like her from Belgium on the 21st convoy. They were neatly dressed, their heads covered by a triangle of white cotton. They were the Grande Hélène and the Grande Fanny. They said that they owed this sartorial privilege to the fact of having joined the women’s orchestra of Birkenau and that after the quarantine, they would join the Kommando orchestra. Violette introduced herself, passed an audition in front of the conductor who was called Tchaikowska, played “La Méditation de Thaïs” by Jules Massenet. She hadn't played since Exodus, for over three years. Her performance was mediocre, and she was refused. She returned to Block 9. Quarantine lasted six weeks. One day, La Grande Hélène suggested that she come and audition again because Tchaikowska had been removed from her position, being assigned the role of Blockälteste, while Alma Rosé had been appointed to her post.
This is how she introduced herself and met Alma Rosé, daughter of Arnold Rosé and niece of Gustav Mahler. She played an aria from "La Comtesse Maritza", a piece that was not too technical, which featured a slow movement, followed by a Czardas.
“I thought that my sense of rhythm and my Hungarian origins could serve me.”
Violette asked permission to rehearse a little, which pleased Alma. After half an hour, Violette played. Alma remained pensive, she was not enthusiastic, told her so, but decided to take her for a week on probation.
Violette was not really reassured, knowing full well that she was a very average violinist.
The orchestra's repertoire consisted of military marches and light music. Alma Rosé, on her arrival, enriched it with more ambitious pieces, such as Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music), Schubert’s Serenade, Chopin’s Sadness, or Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, the solo part of which she played on the violin. Her desire to get the best out of this orchestra was due to her perfectionism, even here in Auschwitz, which some did not understand. A wrong note could put her in a rage.
“We clearly had the impression that she was sincerely hiding the monstrous context that was ours. Much later, when I saw the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, the comparison of the Commander in love with his Bridge, with Alma, in love with Music, struck me with its obviousness.”
Violette was 3rd violin. The orchestra played in particular at the entrance and exit of the
Kommandos camp. On Sundays, they gave concerts in the No man’s land between camps A and B.
And, of course, they played on demand for the SS who came to the Block to listen to music. They had to play in front of Kramer, Mengele, Mandel, Irma Grese, Dexler and other SS men.
But they never played, neither during the selections, nor to accompany a convoy to the gas
chambers, which unfortunately the men’s orchestras sometimes had to do.
On the morning of her fourth day of probation, Violette woke up in Block 9 to find that her clogs had been stolen. It had been raining all night, she arrived barefoot and dirty, her clothes soaked for rehearsal. The head of the block, Tchaikowska, ordered her to wash her feet. There was a basin of ice water in which she soaked her feet and burst into tears. It was too much. She had lost her mother, her father, she was hungry, cold. She could no longer hold back her tears in front of the others who were nevertheless going through the same suffering as her.
Alma arrived:
“What is happening?”
“They stole my galoshes…”
Violette told her misfortune as much as her tears allowed her. Alma simply said:
“Come! You are now a member of the Orchestra.”
Alma accompanied Violette to the Bekleidungskammer (the locker room) and asked to be provided with her equipment for immediate integration.
She had just saved her life.
It was the first time. There was a second.
Violette caught typhus. Burning with fever, she was taken to the Revier, the camp hospital in which it was prudent to stay as little as possible. In addition, a finger infection earned her a phlegmon on the right forearm that had to be opened. A “healing” ointment was applied, followed by a layer of absorbent paper and a bandage made of waffle paper. Violette was delirious, the bandage stiffened and it itched terribly. She decided to open this bandage.
Inside, lice were running. In everyday life, we catch tetanus or we die of sepsis for much less than that. But the wound closed. During this stay, she miraculously passed through two selections.
“I remember it because it was the anniversary of my parents’ wedding. Five days later, it was my birthday. I am 18 years old…”
Violette leaves in a state of extreme weakness and thinness having eaten almost nothing at the Revier, but she resumes her place.
against the sinister Mengele.
She left the Revier on November 4, 1943.,
“I remember One day, when we were returning to the Block, my poor , could no longer carry me, I couldn't follow, and lagged behind, my violin under my arm, far behind. The SS leader of the camp asked Alma who this latecomer was. The orchestra on command continued on its way, only Alma stopped.
I arrived hobbling, and I heard Alma answer him, “She is one of my best violinists, she comes from the Revier!” The SS said that I therefore had to perk up and that he was going to make me give the diet in addition. The diet was indeed a supplement distributed to the Kapos, to the heads of Block and included ½ liter of semolina porridge and ½ bread.
Alma had just saved Violette’s life for the second time. By defending her against the head of the camp, and by making her obtain the diet for 3 months, which helped her considerably to recover her strength.
Time was passing, the Allies were approaching. They were evacuated on October 31, 1944. The orchestra was dissolved and Violette once again boarded a cattle car which was to take her to Bergen-Belsen. In this same train was another very young girl unknown to all, Anne Frank.
Bergen-Belsen was liberated on April 15, 1945, by the English who discovered the horror of the camps.
A month after her release, after being treated for paratyphoid, Violette returned alone to France, to Paris. She quickly returned to Le Havre where she recovered her father’s shop and found her violin. She did not find her teacher who had died under the Allied bombardments.
She never played the violin again.
But she sang. In the 1950s and 60s in what was called the Rive Gauche cabarets. Then at “La Véranda,” in the Central European specialty restaurant that she opened in 1969 in Toulon in the south of France, accompanying herself on the guitar.
Back in Paris in the early 80s, she devoted a lot of her time to testifying in schools, to passing on her story, to trying to say the unspeakable.
She died in Paris on January 28, 2014, at the age of 88.
His children, Valérie and Olivier, discovered the existence of the “Violins of Hope” in a report
broadcast on France 2 in 2019. And it was on November 19, 2022, during the Concert given at Salle Gaveau, that they handed over the violin from Violette in person to Amnon Weinstein in the presence of his wife, his son, and his daughter-in-law, a great soloist who played on stage the same evening at the end of the concert “La Méditation de Thaïs” on the violin by Violette at the request of the luthier.
This violin resonated, revived in this beautiful performance hall in Paris, barely dusted off, not yet restored, with its original strings, 83 years after Violette put it back in its case.
This violin on which she had learned to play, this violin of life, this violin which saved her life.