Auschwitz 1943: The accomplished 18 year old pianist Esther Loewy has been sent to do hard labour, shifting heavy stones. She knows her body can’t take it much longer. One way out is to join the Auschwitz women’s orchestra, assembled on SS orders by Polish music teacher Zofia Czajkowska.
The problem is they don’t have a piano — but they need an accordionist. She can’t play, but the accordion’s keyboard is like that of the piano, she reasons, and it’s worth taking a chance. She’s asked to play a popular song of the time, Du hast Glück bei den Frauen, Bel Ami. (You’re lucky with women, Bel Ami). She knows the song and plays it competently enough to be accepted into the orchestra.
Auschwitz orchestra members were exempt from hard labour and had other privileges, such as more food and medical care.But although they sometimes played to entertain the camp’s high command and staff, they also had a more sinister role: they performed at the arrival of the trains carrying their human cargo and during the selection, which determined who was sent to the gas chamber.
The Nazis’ tactic was to make the prisoners believe that where there’s music it can’t be that bad, she would recall years later. “They didn’t know where they were going, but we knew. We played with tears in our eyes.”
Born in Saarlouis, a region of Germany then under French control, she was one of the four children of Rudolf,Loewy, a teacher and cantor in the local synagogue, and Margarethe, who had met as teenagers in Berlin. Music was an integral part of family life and Esther was encouraged to learn the piano; she often played and sang at concerts held by the Jewish Cultural Association.
But things started to unravel in 1935 when the Saar region was absorbed into the German Reich and the Nuremberg Race Laws were promulgated. Esther’s two oldest siblings succeeded in leaving Germany two years later but the rest of the family did not.
After Kristallnacht in 1938, her parents began organising her emigration to Palestine and sent her to a Zionist training centre, but in 1941 she was arrested and sent to a forced labour camp. That same year, she would later find out, her parents were deported and shot in a forest in Kaunas, Lithuania. In December, 1942, six months before Esther was sent to Auschwitz, her sister Ruth, who had escaped to Switzerland but then deported back to Germany, had herself been sent to the camp and murdered there.
Esther played in the Auschwitz women’s orchestra for several months before she heard the International Red Cross was looking for mischling (half-breed) prisoners as, according to Nazi doctrine, those with some Aryan blood were not to be exterminated. Esther, whose paternal grandmother was Christian, had a chance to escape Auschwitz. She was urged by her fellow inmates to contact the Red Cross so that she could survive and tell their stories for them. She did so and in September she was transferred to the Ravensbrück women’s camp in northern Germany.
With the Allied forces advancing in spring, 1945, the Nazis emptied the camps, forcing inmates on brutal death marches but Esther and some fellow prisoners managed to escape. When word of the Nazis’ official defeat came she found herself in the market square of Lubz, a town in northern Germany. There were scenes of jubilation as American and Russian soldiers embraced each other, happy that the war was finally over. Then a Russian soldier placed a huge picture of Hitler in the middle of the square and two soldiers, one American and one Russian, set fire to it together. The picture ablaze, the soldiers danced around it and Esther played her accordion.
“I will never forget that picture,” she would later say. “It was my liberation from Hitler’s fascism but it wasn’t just my liberation, it was my second birth.”
After a few weeks in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp, she left for a new life in Palestine. There she reconnected with her sister Tosca — their brother Gerhard, was already living in the US. Now that she was alive again she could go back to the love of her youth, music: she studied singing, joined a well-known choir and in 1950 married lorry driver Nissim Bejarano.
But life in Israel wasn’t quite right for her and in 1960 Bejarano moved back to Germany. She ran a number of businesses in Hamburg but at first had difficulty integrating. Occasionally, she found herself looking at people in the street and wondering which of her fellow citizens were former Nazis. Like many survivors, for many years she refused to talk about her experiences during the Holocaust.
It wasn’t until the 1970s when she witnessed neo-Nazis being protected by the police that Bejarano decided to speak out. She joined the Association of those Persecuted by the Nazi Regime and started visiting schools to tell her story and warn against what she saw as a dangerous shift to the right.
Music had saved her in the camp so she decided to use it as a tool to make people aware of the new dangers: she formed a band, Coincidence, with her two children Joram and Edna, and they played anti-war songs and Yiddish music. Music, she always said, was everything to her so it became her weapon “to act against fascism”.
Appalled by the rise of the far right and scornful of the government’s apparent inability to stop it, she placed all her hopes on young people: “We can expect nothing from the government, so the people themselves have to do something about it,” she declared. In her 80s Bejarano proved her point by joining a German hip-hop group, Microphone Mafia, with whom she toured Germany and abroad.
It didn’t matter that she herself didn’t particularly care for hip-hop (“a bit too loud with too much jumping around!”) it was a genre that appealed to the young, her target audience, and the band’s message against intolerance and the new barbarism was all that counted.
She may have cut an incongruous figure, a tiny woman with short snow-white hair singing her Yiddish, Hebrew and Italian songs with a hip-hop band, but her haunting voice, huge personality and even bigger heart always managed to leave audiences spellbound.
Esther Bejarano, who has died aged 96, was awarded the Carl von Ossietzky medal and the German Order of Merit for her fight against fascism and racism. She is survived by her two children, two grandsons and four great-grandchildren.
julie carbonara
Esther Loewy Bejarano, born December 15, 1924. Died July 10, 2021
