On International Piano Day in 2021, the singer-songwriter Roxanne de Bastion sent a post on Twitter/X outlining the story of her Hungarian-Jewish grandfather Stephen, who survived the Holocaust along with his piano. Two days later, she received a message from her now literary agent asking if she would consider writing a book. She jumped at the chance.
De Bastion had always been “fascinated and inspired by” Stephen’s story, which has found its way into her previous albums such as 2017’s Heirlooms & Hearsay. “So I feel very lucky that the opportunity presented itself to me.” She smiles over coffee at a north London café. “And then it was a deep dive into… how do you write a book?”
She was particularly up for the challenge because of the timing – she had just lost her father Richard, who was also a musician. “I missed him so much,” she says. “It felt like a wonderful time to dive into the family history and also see how much of my dad and myself I might find in Stephen.”
From the cassette tapes Stephen de Bastion recorded late at night over red wine, before his death in 1988, and research into Holocaust survivors’ accounts, Roxanne wrote The Piano Player of Budapest. She had never felt ready to listen to the life story Stephen shared, and the book was a great reason to “confront” that.
Stephen’s career as a professional musician – which he’d doggedly built through the 1930s, performing across Hungary and Switzerland, as well as scoring film music – was ripped apart by the Second World War. One of 1,070 Jewish Hungarian men sent to the Russian front for forced labour in 1942, he was among the eight who returned, only to then be deported to Mauthausen and Gunskirchen concentration camps. This too he survived – for more than a year until his liberation.
Tickling the ivories: Stephen de Bastion
Inheriting Stephen’s piano when her father died, Roxanne was more than familiar with the antique baby grand that lived in the Berlin house in which she grew up. She learned to play on the instrument, and would fall asleep to the sounds of her father playing it. But it wasn’t until she dived into Stephen’s story that she understood how much the piano had been through.
“I started feeling a great responsibility to preserve it,” she says. “Instruments carry memories of their players, especially pianos; the keys are weathered from touch. It’s such a special feeling to play those same keys that my dad, Stephen, and my great grandmother have all played on.”
Schooled in Germany, Roxanne had studied the Holocaust frequently to know the extent of the horrors. What hit her on listening to Stephen’s recollections were his omissions. His account brimmed with detail, yet when he arrived at the infamous Mauthausen, what he shared of his ordeal was limited to just two or three anecdotes.
“I got emotional over that, because I felt like he’d taken me by the hand and guided me through his life, but he didn’t want to take me there.” Roxanne felt conflicted as to whether she should research what he would have experienced at the camp. “I had this feeling that he didn’t want me to know. But I decided for the sake of the book I had to, and it was hard to read what humans are capable of.”
She can’t come to terms with the fact that so many of the perpetrators never faced prosecution for their crimes. As for her family, there is also the injustice of compensation. “My family fought hard to get compensation for the property that was stolen in Hungary, and we didn’t get anywhere with it. And just to know that genocide on that scale takes millions of silent complicit people really brings home how important it is for all of us to speak up about any and all injustices.”
Roxanne didn’t know how much she needed to tell Stephen’s story before she had the chance to do it. For a start, it helped her to process the grief of losing her father. It was also, she says, an “opportunity to understand more about who I am and where I come from”.
In the book, Roxanne details her secular upbringing, which she believes stems in part from her father’s inherited fears of identifying as Jewish. As children of Holocaust survivors, her father and aunt Julie were not taught Hungarian, or anything about their Jewish heritage.
“They were raised to be as English as possible. My grandparents tried desperately to assimilate, and that only ever works in part,” she says with bitter knowing.
Her grandfather would always say that the family were Hungarian first, Jewish second, and he stressed that he had attended a Catholic school. “But it certainly didn’t save him from being persecuted. So my dad felt that distrust in authority, not wanting to be labelled in any way. My dad held onto a lot of fears.”
That wish to not be labelled extended not just to his religion but also his visual impairment. Roxanne remembers arguing with him over why he refused to get a disability pass until he finally told her, ‘I don’t want anything like that in writing about me.’ “And that’s when I realised… that fear, because everyone who had a disability…” her voice quietens.
“They were left alone to overcome their trauma. It broke my heart when my mum told me that my grandmother once confessed that she had nightmares every night of uniformed men coming to take her away. Being so close with my dad and my aunt, I have seen firsthand how much that trauma has affected them and shaped their lives. Inevitably, that spilt into my generation, although I have the gift of distance. But this trauma does get passed on and I feel it in my bones.”
For Roxanne, this inherited trauma expresses itself in not taking things for granted things that living in a democracy mostly do: a bank account, or the right to live somewhere. “I know these things can change from one day to the next, because that’s exactly what happened to my grandparents.”
Growing up between Germany and Britain, the bilingual daughter of a Berliner mother and a British father, Roxanne has always “acutely” felt a sense of otherness, that wherever she was, she was “the foreigner”. Has the process of writing the book altered her identity? “It’s interesting,” she says carefully. “I held my dad’s fear in me for a long time. Had I been asked ten years ago, ‘Do you feel Jewish?’, I would have categorically said ‘no’. I’m so much more interested now.”
The process of listening to Stephen’s and others’ stories, including the comedian Sarah Silverman’s podcast about her family, made her realise just how many Jewish traits she herself embodied – not least her sense of humour. “I do feel quite at home in that culture.”
Still, she remains wary of giving herself a label. “I am not a religious person. I’m still on a journey of discovery.”
Although she hopes the story teaches many things, especially “how old antisemitism is and how little it takes for it to be on the rise again. My grandparents felt so at home in Britain, and they felt safe here. This is so sad to say, but I’m glad that they’re not around to witness its rise now. It’s a scary time. So it’s all the more important to share these stories.”
Alongside the book she is releasing an album of her grandfather’s compositions, including reinterpretations, on which the autobiographical An Old Mill is Dreaming is the highlight.
“I hope this doesn’t sound too ethereal,” says Roxanne, “But it felt like a generational healing to hear the piano sing out those compositions again. I’m excited for the world to hear them.”
The Piano Player of Budapest is published this week. The album Songs from The Piano Player of Budapest comes out on June 21
