The Shoah robbed us of so much creative talent — and the last of those who survived are now leaving us

Bela’s children Claire and Andy told me it was extremely difficult for Bela to speak about the war even to them.

A distinguished musician, Bela was for decades the leader of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and also a member of the Philharmonia. He played under many leading conductors including Klemperer, Haitink, Boulez and Wand. He performed for Yehudi Menuhin, both as a child before the war and again after it and many times at that most British of institutions, the Last Night of The Proms, meeting many dignitaries such as Princess Diana.

But Bela had grown up a persecuted Jew in Hungary. As a teenager he survived an Austrian slave labour camp, the Belsen death camp in Germany, and finally Theresienstadt (Terezin) north of Prague.

Most of Bela’s relatives were murdered along the way. His mother miraculously managed to survive with him, but died of starvation in May 1945 a few hours after Theresienstadt became the final camp to be liberated. The Soviet army doctors were unable to save her.

Bela was one of the last two concentration camp survivors who were professional musicians in Britain. The other was his friend Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, now 97 and as sharp as ever. She was the cellist in the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz, forced by her sadistic captors to perform for the SS and their wives and to play for her fellow Jews as they were gassed. (The only other member of the Auschwitz orchestra still alive is Hilde Grunbaum in Israel.)

“When we met in London, Bela and I never spoke about the war,” Anita told me. “We didn’t need to. We had this absolute unspoken bond.”

From Auschwitz, Anita was sent to the equally hellish Belsen in October 1944 at the time that Bela was there. Among other teenagers imprisoned there was Anne Frank, who was born in 1929 a year after Bela, and of course didn’t survive.

I first met Bela at the home of the pianist Murray Perahia. We immediately clicked. Bela was lively, engaging, clever, modest, kind and witty.

Then in February 2020, the Covid pandemic descended upon us and Bela went into total isolation alone for two years. He didn’t leave his home even once. His beloved wife, the cellist Dorothy Browning, had died three years earlier.

I used to call him regularly to see how he was doing during lockdown. It was at that time that Bela told me that he wanted to talk publicly about his life so we recorded an informal interview over Zoom.

We spoke of his childhood as a gifted young violinist in Hungary, of how with the growth of pre-war antisemitism the family name was changed from Berger to the Hungarian-sounding Dekany.

How his maternal grandfather, David Raab, a headmaster at a Jewish school, came from the same village in northern Hungary (now Slovakia) as the then foreign secretary Dominic Raab’s Jewish family (who escaped Czechoslovakia just before the Holocaust), and that there was a good chance they were related.

And we spoke of music which, Bela said, “is my religion, my seventh heaven”, although adding that he was “a proud cultural Jew”.

He spoke of his childhood family friend from Hungary, fellow Holocaust survivor Avram Hershko, who went on to teach at Israel’s Technion and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2004.

Indeed, thinking of Bela, and of Avram Hershko, and of the many other talented Holocaust survivors, one can only lament just what a loss the Holocaust was not only for the victims, but for all humanity. For culture, science, medicine.

Who knows what wonders the murdered millions might have contributed to the world.