Shimon Krongold with his violin in his Warsaw apartment, 1924. At the request of Yaakov Zimmerman, Krongold would allow young Jewish violinists to practice in this very room. One was Michel Schwalbé, who survived the Holocaust to eventually become the concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic. (Courtesy of Nadir Krongold.)
As the world’s leading authority on violins of the Holocaust, Amnon is frequently contacted by descendants of Holocaust victims looking for instruments that were once owned by their families. One day in 2008, Dov Brayer brought Amnon a picture of his brother Shevah. The faded black-and-white photograph was taken at the Brayer home in Lwów, Poland, in the mid-1930s, before Shevah was taken to a concentration camp and killed. In the picture, Shevah holds a violin that Dov hopes to reclaim someday.
“This was a professional violin, not just a simple Klezmer,” Amnon deduced after looking at the photo. “And it was made in Poland.”
“Yes, yes,” Dov confirmed excitedly. “It was given to my brother as a gift by a Polish noblewoman. He was a concertmaster. We believe he played it at the entrance to the Janowska concentration camp near Lwów. That is where he died.”
Amnon paused for a moment in the memory of yet another violin virtuoso whose life and career were cut tragically short. “We can never understand what happened in the Holocaust,” he finally concluded. “But if we can understand what thoughts went through the minds of the people who played music at the entrances to the camps . . . maybe we can understand something. These instruments are a testimony from another world.”
Amnon took out a magnifying glass to inspect the photo even further. “The scroll of this violin is extraordinary,” he said, pointing to the decorative dog’s head that had been carved into the top of the instrument. “I’ve never seen anything like it.
“The chances of finding it are one in ten million,” Amnon warned Dov. “But thanks to this unique scroll, at least it’s not impossible.
“And if I do find this violin,” he continued, “it will be played in a huge concert.”85
The Brayers are just one of thousands of Jewish families who lost their violins during the Holocaust. Some instruments were sold for pittances when their owners became desperate for money to feed their families or to emigrate. Others—like the violin that Feivel Wininger left behind in Gura Humorului—were abandoned when their owners were forced from their homes for arrest or deportation. Still others fell into new hands when their owners died in ghettos and concentration camps, as was apparently the case with Shevah Brayer’s violin.
Many instruments—like the Amati that Feivel played in Transnistria—were stolen by neighbors, local authorities, and German officials. After initiating a comprehensive campaign to eradicate the Jews in Europe, the Nazis launched a corresponding initiative to destroy all Jewish cultural and economic activities. This started with the confiscation of millions of valuables such as art, jewelry, books, and religious treasures. Over the course of World War II, a special team of Nazi musicologists seized hundreds of thousands of music books, as well as tens of thousands of musical instruments, manuscripts, and music scores from Jewish musicians and music businesses.
Only a small fraction of these stolen items were ever returned to their rightful owners. Many of them were destroyed during the war. The majority of the objects that did survive remained in German hands. Some looted artifacts were given to German soldiers as rewards for their service. Other war booty was reallocated to German families as compensation for belongings that were destroyed during bombings. The items that were ultimately uncovered by the Red Army were shipped to the east. They would never be seen again.
The Western Allies largely failed in their attempts to return the cultural artifacts to their legal owners. It was difficult to track down survivors and witnesses. Records of the stolen instruments were often inaccessible, incomplete, or missing altogether. Those who had just survived the Holocaust were not likely to still have bills of sale, certificates of authenticity, or any other documents that could identify and prove ownership of a rare instrument. Even when there are photographs of owners like Shevah Brayer holding distinctive violins, such records are useless if the instruments themselves remain missing. It is impossible to know whether those violins no longer exist, or whether they remain concealed in secret collections.
Records of the Netherlands’ Ministry of Finance include sixty reports of instruments that were stolen from the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation. The claims include valuable violins by Amati and Guarneri as well as instruments by lesser makers that were confiscated by the Germans when their owners were taken prisoner or fled their homes. Most of these thefts were never investigated. Many of the reports lacked descriptions of the instruments that would be detailed enough to easily distinguish that particular instrument from the thousands of others just like it in Nazi collections. Other instruments were simply not valuable enough to pursue. Only one report is marked “Returned to the Netherlands.”86
Another instrument that has been returned to its owner’s family once belonged to Shimon Krongold, an amateur violinist whose accomplished daughter had played with the Warsaw Philharmonic. Shimon’s brother Chaim immigrated to Palestine in 1923, never to see Shimon again. Chaim married and raised two children, who knew little about their uncle Shimon beyond what they could glean from an old picture of him holding his beloved violin. Chaim heard that Shimon escaped from Warsaw to Russia and then to Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Later, he learned that Shimon had died of typhus in Tashkent.
In 1946, a man visited Chaim’s apartment in Jerusalem. Chaim’s daughter-in-law answered the doorbell.
“Are you Krongold?” the stranger asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Do you have any connection to Shimon Krongold?”
“Yes, of course we knew about him.”
“Well, I have something for you from him.” The stranger unfolded a shabby blanket that he was carrying in his arms. Inside was a violin. “This violin belonged to Shimon,” he explained. He refused to provide any details about how he had come into possession of the instrument.
By this time, Chaim had gotten involved in the conversation. He was a prominent lawyer. He knew his rights. “Okay, if it belonged to him, it belongs to the family,” he stated. “So would you please leave the violin with us?”
“Yes, of course,” the stranger responded. But only in exchange for money.
“Why should I buy the violin that belonged to him?” Chaim demanded. “Did you buy it from him? Did you pay for this?”
The stranger still would not answer. Instead, he simply turned to walk away with the instrument.
Chaim was outraged by the injustice. He had already lost Shimon, and now a cagey stranger was demanding money to return Shimon’s violin, which Chaim felt was his rightful property. He was willing to let the man and the violin go, but his wife intervened. She darted from the kitchen and caught up with the stranger.
“What do you want for it?” she asked.
The man quoted a reasonable price for the instrument, which Chaim’s wife agreed to pay. Chaim’s son Nadir remembers the amount being around 250 U.S. dollars.
The violin stayed with the Krongold family in Jerusalem as one of their only remembrances of Shimon. Nadir later traveled to Tashkent to try to find his uncle’s grave, but even the Jewish community there was unable to uncover any information about him. All that is left of Shimon is the photograph of him with the violin and the instrument itself. “This is the only memory that we have from him,” Nadir explains. “The only memory and the only story about his life.”87
In September 1999, Amnon gave an interview on the radio about Motele Schlein’s Violin. He asked listeners to contact him if they knew of any other instruments that were connected to the Holocaust. Nadir and his sister Edna responded by bringing him their uncle’s violin. After comparing the photograph of Shimon with the instrument the family had purchased, Amnon was able to verify that this was indeed Shimon Krongold’s Violin.
The biggest surprise came when Amnon peered into one of the violin’s f-shaped sound holes. Attached to the inside of the instrument is a label that reads, in a combination of Hebrew and Yiddish: “This violin I made to commemorate my loyal friend Mr. Shimon Krongold, Warsaw, 1924.” The dedication is signed by Yaakov Zimmerman. Amnon was holding in his hands an instrument that was made by the very same man who had taught his father how to repair violins more than sixty years earlier. The circle was complete.
Unidentified Violins
For every violin that is recovered, there are thousands that may never be returned to the families of their previous owners. This includes dozens of instruments that Amnon has collected while scouring the world for violins with connections to the Holocaust. While the instruments have survived, information about the musicians who once played them has not. There is simply no way of tracking down the original owners—if those violinists or anyone in their family even survived the Holocaust.
While their owners are unknown, the craftsmanship of their construction and the ornate Stars of David they bear indicate that they were once owned by Jewish musicians. Klezmer performers often decorated their instruments with Jewish symbols. The more “Jewish” the violin looked, the more likely that the local rabbi would recommend that its owner be hired to play at weddings—and the more likely that the performer would receive a few extra coins or a little extra food from the celebrants. One of the violins with a Star of David also features a lion’s head, to which its owner later added two decorative diamonds that no doubt delighted the children in his audience. A violin by Yaakov Zimmerman—one of three in Amnon’s collection, including Shimon Krongold’s Violin—is adorned with no fewer than five Stars of David.
Amnon has deduced that some of the unclaimed instruments were played in ghettos and concentration camps, based on distinctive damage to the tops of the violins that comes only from being played outside in the wind, rain, and snow—something no musician would have ever done unless he was forced to do so under extraordinary conditions. Auschwitz Main Camp violinist Teodor Liese once spoke of liters of water pouring out of his instrument while the orchestra was performing in the rain.88 One of the instruments was damaged beyond repair. Amnon has left it in the ruined state in which he found it, as a testament to the thousands of other instruments and the millions of lives that were shattered in the Holocaust.
Amnon considers the unidentified violins to be the most precious instruments in his collection. They are not expensive instruments like the Ole Bull Guarneri that Ernst Glaser brought to Bergen or the Amati that Feivel Wininger played in Transnistria. They are simple, unsophisticated violins that represent the everyday Jewish lives and the everyday Jewish traditions that were destroyed during the Holocaust. They are artifacts of the Jewish culture that the Nazis tried unsuccessfully to wipe off the planet. To Amnon, the historical and sentimental value of these instruments far surpasses any monetary worth.
Amnon has never known the names of any of his uncles, aunts, and cousins who died in the Holocaust. Since they were buried in mass graves, there are no graveyards to help him piece together his genealogy. There are no family records, nor surviving relatives whom he can visit to learn the stories about the family members that his parents had been too grief-stricken to talk about. His only way of connecting with his family is through the craft his father taught him: repairing violins.
And so Amnon continues to collect and restore instruments that were played by Jewish musicians during the Holocaust. Each violin tells its own story. Each violin is a tombstone for a relative he never knew.