Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Lost Violin of Auschwitz Plays Again

Amnon Weinstein has devoted his life to researching and collecting Holocaust-era violins.

(Reuters) — A violin thrown some seventy years ago from a train transporting French Jews to the Nazi Auschwitz death camp will sound in the concert hall of the Berlin Philharmonic on Tuesday night, along with other instruments once played by victims of the Holocaust.

A French railwayman caught that unknown passenger’s violin and gave it to his daughter to play.

Years later it found its way into the hands of Israeli violin-maker and restorer Amnon Weinstein, whose extraordinary collection comprises violins embodying their former owners’ tragic histories and stories of survival.

Tuesday marks 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops. Around 1.5 million people, mainly European Jews, were gassed, shot, hanged and burned at the camp in southern Poland during World War Two.

Tuesday’s concert will also feature one of Weinstein’s violins that had belonged to a member of Auschwitz’s prisoner orchestra.

The orchestra played while inmates were marched to work and to entertain guards. The ability to play often saved lives.

Like his violin-maker father Moshe, who was born in Vilnius but emigrated to Palestine, Amnon initially wanted to let his family history rest. Every relative that had remained in eastern Europe died in the Holocaust.

Then in the 1980s, a man walked into Amnon’s workshop who told him he had played his violin in Auschwitz. He hadn’t touched the instrument since, but wanted to pass it down to his grandson in good condition and gave it to Weinstein to restore.

The front was damaged from having been played in snow and rain. When he took it apart, Weinstein found ash inside.

Later, and encouraged by a German bow-maker working with him, Weinstein began to research the history of some of the German violins already in his father’s workshop – instruments which Jews fleeing Europe could no longer bear to play, and had sold on arrival in Tel Aviv. Nobody in Israel wanted them.

Some of the violins which will also be played on Tuesday followed their former owners half away around the world through decades of homelessness and exile. The collection is known as the “Violins of Hope.”

On concert includes works by Jewish composers such as Mahler, banned from performance by the Nazis, as well as works by German composers such as Bach and Beethoven.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.