Editorial

On 8 May we marked 80 years since the end of the Second World War in Europe: VE Day.  In our mind’s eye many of us probably see the famous newsreel footage of British crowds celebrating in the Mall, cheering and singing, dancing and embracing.

But for Jews on the continent, for the remaining third of the Jewish people who had lived and thrived there before the advent of Nazism, it was more of a mixed experience. No doubt everyone was glad to know that Germany had been defeated. Yet once these few survivors, often emerging from the camps or from hiding, tried to return to their homes, they did not necessarily have a happy homecoming. In our two features this month, we explore this theme. Dr Ellis Spicer, author of Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Britain: Community and Belonging, gives an overview of what happened, and four G2G speakers tell of their own relative’s experience in returning to their old hometown.

In August we will be taking a summer break and there will be no Events Update that month. We look forward to seeing you again for our full newsletter in September.

Vivienne Cato

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G2G News

This academic year has seen continued growth for G2G, and we are receiving new bookings daily.

Across 2024-25 our speakers have been asked to present to 446 audiences in educational, community and civic organisations, numbering in total over 45,000 people. This represents an increase of 20 per cent on the previous year. Schools continue to represent more than 75 per cent of our talks, with civic organisations also showing increased demand.  Overall, since becoming a charity in January 2020, we have delivered over 1,300 presentations to approximately 140,000 people.

The number of our G2G Holocaust presenters has increased from 37 to 42 and we expect to have a total of 48 accredited speakers by the end of 2025. We continue successfully to recruit new speakers, with a specific focus on the Third Generation and those living outside London.  In total we are currently assisting over 20 speakers to develop their presentations, with ongoing mentoring, training and technical assistance. 

Our continued growth is thanks to the hard work of all our wonderful volunteers, who are involved in publicising our work, generating bookings, mentoring our new speakers, fundraising, and delivering presentations – all overseen and driven by our planning committee and trustees. As a result, we continue to receive wonderful feedback about our presentations to schools and to adult audiences. Here is a sample. 

“The presentation on the Holocaust was truly powerful. The way they conveyed the historical significance, and the emotional depth of the topic was amazing. I really appreciated how they highlighted both the personal and collective impact, making it not just informative, but deeply moving. It’s clear they put a lot of effort into it, and it really resonated with me. The presenter’s slides were meaningful and very engaging to one and it also was very appealing to one’s eyes as it shows and strengthens the point and story.”(School student, 14) 

“It helps me to…. remind the students that it began with small things. I have been in teaching for 20 years…. The work G2G is doing is by far the most engaging and impactful that I have experienced.”
(Teacher, Maidstone)

“This was the third year of Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh’s commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day, and we thank Generation 2 Generation profoundly for educating us about the Holocaust.  All the speakers we have had so far have been passionate about sharing their experiences and thoughts.  Thank you Generation 2 Generation. I think these stories are a powerful medium for telling stories of persecution of Hindus in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Afghanistan. We too need to gather personal stories and convey them effectively.”
(The Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh) 

We invite you to contact us to book a speaker for your organisation. Either email bookings@generation2generation.org.uk or Click here to book.

It was often assumed that liberated survivors wanted to return to their nation of origin, or what they defined as ‘home’. It was assumed that the fall of Nazi Germany and the end of the Second World War meant an end to ‘statelessness’. However, Joanne Reilly has highlighted how there was a ‘slow realisation’ that many refugees and survivors did not share this view, and desired a fresh start away from their trauma. Katy Long has also drawn attention to the rise of Communism in Eastern Europe, provoking a lesser desire to return to another authoritarian regime.
 
There was also a much simpler explanation for a lack of desire to return ‘home’: many survivors did not consider their countries of origin their home anymore, rather the site of their families’ extermination. The months following their liberation became not just an attempt at physical and emotional rehabilitation but gathering information about their families’ fates. There was a broad sense of having ‘nothing to go back to’, with the destruction of whole communities giving surviving Jews the sense that they would be returning to a ‘hostile graveyard’.
 
‘Emotionally empty’, survivors sought being far away from the geography of their trauma. Such severe loss, particularly of important places, and indeed the overall concept of what their home was and became can have a paralysing effect on the relationship survivors have to their past, present and future.
 
There have been numerous writings on the concept of home and what the destruction of home can mean to an individual, and the trauma it can cause, or indeed worsen. This evolves for survivors as they become transnational in their approach and immigrate to countries such the UK, evoking how they can develop attachments ‘to more than one place and the ways in which home is shaped by memories as well as everyday life in the present’. Writing in 2001, John Porteous and Sandra Smith highlighted that no word existed for the action of destroying peoples’ homes or expelling them from their homelands, proposing the neologisms of ‘domicide’ (home destruction) and ‘memoricide’ (the destruction of memory’s ‘physical prop, the cultural landscape’).
 
Peter Read has written of the devastation that can be found when an individual returns to locations they associate with their childhood and finds them destroyed. This was indeed the case for many who attempted to return to their hometowns, who found their previous homes to be occupied by those unwilling to relinquish them, and continued antisemitism despite liberation from Nazism. Despite Poland being freed from the Nazi regime, centuries of antisemitism endured, with Roman Halter recalling examples of stones being thrown at them, with the police and military laughing rather than punishing the aggressors. These instances such as those recalled by Halter are but a small insight into the treatment of the Jews in postwar Poland who attempted to return to a place they had previously called home.
 
The stories of violence and threat encountered by young survivors who returned to postwar Poland from Theresienstadt seeking their lost homes and enquiring as to the fate of their families resonated within the testimony they have given since their arrival in the UK. The most extensive example of published material relating to this theme is former ’45 Aid Society President Sir Ben Helfgott’s1983 article for the Society Journal documenting his experience of returning to Poland. Evocatively, he opens his article with the following statement: ‘When I recall the nightmares of the Holocaust years, there is none that fills me with a greater dread and horror than the one I experienced on my return to Poland soon after my liberation’. Travelling with his cousin to their hometown of Piotrków, they had been treated well on the journey, and it had begun to restore their faith in humanity. To their dismay, this did not last long after crossing the border from Czechoslovakia into Poland, where they were interrogated as to their identities, with proof being demanded that they were survivors. Upon producing their Theresienstadt ID, they were asked to attend the police station with the officers, who proceeded to refer to them as ‘f****** Jews’ and demanded that they be silent. They were taken to a house where their Red Cross-provided clothes were stolen, and they were threatened with guns despite desperate pleas for mercy. The lines with which their interactions with the officers closed were haunting and reflect just how close the two boys had come to death: ‘You can consider yourselves very lucky. We have killed many of your kind. You are the first we have left alive’.
 
Ben’s article closed with how fortunate he felt to have escaped when so many Jews who returned to Poland were killed, and how he often wonders what happened to those individuals who were ‘strewn like dogs in unknown and forsaken places’. Ben’s powerful recounting of this additional trauma reminds us that antisemitism did not end with the end of the war and that survivors faced additional tribulations after their liberation. The opportunity to start again in different countries such as Britain was vital for these young survivors to begin to rebuild their lives.

Footnotes

ⁱ Reilly, Belsen, 81.
ii Long, Katy. 2013. The Point of No Return: Refugees, Rights and Repatriation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 62.
iii Reilly, Belsen, 81.
iv Long, The Point of No Return, 62.
v Unknown, Author. 15 June 1945. The Tragedy of Terezin. Jewish Chronicle, 9.
vi Reilly, Belsen, 83.
vii Read, Peter. 1996. Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 29-30.
viii Blunt, Alison and Dowling, Robyn. 2006. Home. Abingdon: Routledge, 202.
ix Porteous, John Douglas and Smith, Sandra Eileen. 2001. Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, ix.
x Read, Returning to Nothing, vii.
xi Helfgott, Ben. 1983. My Welcome to Poland After the War. Journal of the ’45 Aid Society, 9.
xii Ibid, 10.
xiii Ibid, 11.

Reilly, Belsen, 81.
Long, Katy. 2013. The Point of No Return: Refugees, Rights and Repatriation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 62.
Reilly, Belsen, 81.
Long, The Point of No Return, 62.
Unknown, Author. 15 June, 1945. The Tragedy of Terezin. Jewish Chronicle, 9.
Reilly, Belsen, 83.
Read, Peter. 1996. Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 29-30.
Blunt, Alison and Dowling, Robyn. 2006. Home. Abingdon: Routledge, 202.
Porteous, John Douglas and Smith, Sandra Eileen. 2001. Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, ix.
Read, Returning to Nothing, vii.
Helfgott, Ben. 1983. My Welcome to Poland After the War. Journal of the ’45 Aid Society, 9.
Ibid, 10.
Ibid, 11.

Experiences of Survivor homecomings from within G2G 

From 2010–14, I wrote my mother Naomi Blake’s story of survival from Auschwitz. Despite all the terrible things she experienced, the part that I found the hardest to write was her experience of returning home.

She told me how she constantly dreamed that her father would be waiting for her on the doorstep of their house. But of course, her father was not there and what she found was a house in ruins, windows smashed, doors taken off their hinges, and all their possessions gone. As she walked around in shock she noticed white specks on the ground in the courtyard. Looking more closely, she discovered that these white specks were the remnants of her father’s holy books, torn to shreds and stamped into the ground. Overcome, she fainted and was helped by a neighbour who suggested where she might find assistance.

Assistance came in the form of other Jews who had recently returned and had seen or heard about the fate of her family members. She found her sister Malchi and her brother Moishe waiting for her. They were given a place to stay by a very kind Roma woman, who herself had been persecuted and then saved by a Russan soldier.

There they waited for news of the rest of the family. The wait was excruciating. Every day they went to the train station to see who descended the trains, every day they talked to different people to see if they had come across family members during their incarceration. Finally, they were overjoyed to see their sisters Ruchel and Sari return, together with Sari’s husband Erno. But from a family of 27 people only seven survived. Her parents and four brothers and sisters, along with their spouses and ten young children, had been murdered.

As I wrote this part of the story, I could feel the sadness and the emptiness, living in a place with no Jewish children and no-one over the age of 35, with no parents to offer advice.

My mother said, “It so happens that one feels guilty, it’s not a pleasant thing to survive other people, especially children. In the town you didn’t see a Jew. There used to be lots of bearded Jews, lots of children humming, playing, screaming, crying. Nothing on the street, only a few non-Jewish children, and they kept very quiet, they felt very uncomfortable. Whenever walking the streets we remembered, especially the children. We already knew that they did not survive at all. So, we ended up crying on each other’s shoulders wherever we happened to be together.”

{Source: British Library Audio Collection https://www.holocausttestimony.org.uk/interviewees/naomi-blake}

After surviving seven months in Auschwitz and having been liberated on 5 May from a munitions factory in Czechoslovakia, Lela was able to make her way back to Athens with the help of the Red Cross. She was the only survivor of her entire Greek family; although she entered Auschwitz with her six-year-old daughter Marcelle and husband Joseph, they did not make it out again.

By the time Lela arrived in Omonoia Square in central Athens, it was midsummer and very hot. Initially, nobody recognised her as her head was shaven, and she was wearing a military man’s uniform. When it became clear who she was, a huge number of people arrived to collect her, all fighting over who was to take her home! They asked her, “Where is Marcelle?” Lela answered flippantly, “Oh, she’s burnt”. Her friends looked at each other with disbelief, concluding that she must be mentally ill.

Since Lela’s property was no longer hers and had been looted after her deportation, her wonderful neighbours, the Kiritsis family, took her in and looked after her as if she were one of their own. Back in 1944, they had risked their lives to hide Lela, Marcelle and Joseph from the Nazis. Now that Lela was the only one left alive, they did everything they could to alleviate her suffering.

Lela remained there until 1946, when she joined her cousins, her only living relatives, in London.

My uncle Raimund Neumeyer came with my mother Ruth on a Kindertransport in 1939. The previous year the Burgomeister of Dachau, SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Dobler, forced them to leave their house in Dachau so that the town could be ‘free of Jews’. Just after his 18th birthday in 1943 Raimund joined the British army, anglicised his name to Raymond Newland and was posted to Germany as an interpreter for the intelligence service a month before the war ended.

In his letters to Ruth he describes the utter destruction of the country and his horror at the news from the newly liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In 1946 he managed to get leave to visit Munich, where the Neumeyers spent their last months together in 1939, and found it in skeletal ruins. He hitchhiked from there to Dachau to visit old family friends: ‘In contrast to Munich, everything is intact: there’s virtually nothing changed at all.’ The former Neumeyer house was occupied by a tenant, who recognised him, wearing British army uniform, and screamed in shock. He then mounted a campaign to get Karl Dobler prosecuted: Dobler remained a free man but lost his job at Dachau town hall.

For more about Raymond’s letters to Ruth while he was serving as a British soldier, see my blog:
https://ephraimneumeyer.wordpress.com/2022/03/30/letters-from-war-torn-germany

In May 1945, my father returned to his home country, Czechoslovakia, for the first time since he had left in 1938. He was part of the team of medics who were sent to help with the outbreak of typhus in Terezín.

Before taking up his duties there, he visited his sister Ilse’s flat in Prague. The concierge told him that Ilse and her two children had been taken to Terezín in 1942 and from there, ten days later, she believed they were sent to the Lublin concentration camp. She had no more news of them after that.

Greatly saddened, my father then managed to find some cousins and an aunt in Prague who had, amazingly, survived Auschwitz. They told him that they had witnessed non-Jews sharing their rations with Ilse and the children, risking heavy penalties. One cousin told him she had seen his parents regularly in Auschwitz during 1944 but after a few months, saw them no more.

Knowing all his close family had been murdered, my father took up his duties in Terezín. The work was dangerous due to the high risk of contagion. Even some of his medical colleagues died from typhus.

After the work in Terezín was done, Dad returned to his old home in Brno. A neighbour told him most of the family’s furniture and belongings had been stolen, but he retrieved a few items. These were all that remained of his former life at the end of the war.

So Dad decided to make his home in Wigan, where he married and raised his family.

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Editorial

Music and the Shoah

May 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of VE Day. It follows close upon the commemoration of Yom HaShoah, the worldwide Jewish community’s Holocaust Memorial Day, which itself follows on from the anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen on 15 April, which G2G marked on 6 May. The Hebrew date of 27 Nisan was chosen for this by the State of Israel in 1951 as it marks the date of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1944. In this edition you can read about G2G’s contribution to Yom HaShoah UK’s ceremony in London and about our event commemorating Bergen-Belsen at JW3.

The hope for a better future that is implicit in the marking of Yom HaShoah is shared by the human expression of music, its creation and its performance. In this edition we look at two Jewish composers of the Holocaust period whose music, once lost, is being rediscovered. Heinz Lewin was a celebrated and successful composer, widely known, whose career and life ended in Auschwitz. Hans Neumeyer, despite being blind from age 13, was a prolific composer who died in Terezin. Only a tiny fraction of his work has survived.

Whilst music was exploited and perverted by the Nazis to mask the horrors of their regime – one thinks particularly of camp orchestras of conscripted Jewish prisoners – when freely chosen it expresses joy and freedom. We have focussed on music in this issue as a testimony to the continuing optimism of the human spirit.

Vivienne Cato

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Yom HaShoah at Victoria Tower Gardens, 23 April 2025

Diana Cook

Survivor Harry Olmer and I stand in front of thousands of people gathered to pay tribute on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Harry stands proud in his dark suit, family members close behind him. There are six candles to light, honouring not only the six million, but also survivors, other innocent victims, righteous gentiles who risked their own lives, one and half million murdered children, and the lost generations. Each of the six candles is lit by a survivor, together with community representatives. I was honoured to be asked, together with fellow speaker, Maralyn Turgel, to light candles on behalf of G2G.

I was expecting the Yom HaShoah ceremony at Victoria Tower Gardens by the Houses of Parliament to be solemn, but nothing quite prepared me for the heart-wrenching interviews with survivors, who, despite suffering brutality, cruelty and degradation found the strength to restart their lives after the war. I think I must have had something in my eye when El Malei Rachanim, the memorial prayer, was sung from the depths of cantor Jonny Turgel’s heart.

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Stories of Liberation, Resilience, Relief and Remembrance

Seymour Kelly and Liz Kelly

On Monday 6 May, JW3 in London hosted a G2G memorial event marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945. A moving tribute to the liberators of Europe and Holocaust survivors, the evening began with filmed testimonies of survivors remembering the moment they were freed.

G2G presenter John Wood spoke about his father Lt Col Leonard Berney, one of the first British Army liberators of Bergen-Belsen, and about why his father’s eyewitness account is still relevant today. Dr Peter Lantos, a Hungarian Jew who survived Belsen, spoke rivetingly about being, with his mother, miraculously liberated by the US Army from a train intended to deport some of Belsen’s surviving prisoners. He tragically lost his father and brother. Post-war in the UK, Dr Lantos went on to specialise in neurodegenerative diseases. Later in life, he managed to track down and meet up with the US soldier who had secured his freedom.

Ella Garai-Ebner, a 3G speaker for G2G, told the story of her Hungarian grandfather, Dr George Garai. The horrors of slave labour and concentration camps left Dr Garai unable to speak about his experiences. However, towards the end of his life he committed his story to writing, asking his descendants to tell the world.

Two actors from Time will Tell Theatre took to the stage with a spellbinding delivery of ‘Hell on Earth’, voicing testimonies of British forces staff in Belsen. Then JW3 Holocaust Education Programmer Thamar Barnett led a lively discussion panel with the guest speakers. Fittingly, the evening ended with more filmed reflections from Holocaust survivors – lessons for the future.

Memories don’t always dull as we grow older and further from events.
My mother, Yvonne, has devoted the last several years to researching the grandparents she never knew, three lives extinguished in Auschwitz and the fourth in Riga.

From fragmented anecdotes, scraps of paper, interviews and the internet, she continues to uncover the story of her father’s father, the composer, Heinz Lewin. Eighty-three years after his final performance and his murder, his music and cabaret bring vibrant life from the ashes.

Heinz was born in Wiesbaden in 1888. There are records of Jews active in business around Wiesbaden’s thermal springs from the 14th and 15th centuries. In the 1920s, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig explored their Jewish spirituality there. His parents Moses and Chaja had hoped that Heinz would take over the family cigarette business they had established in 1891. It was a successful enterprise, at the forefront of glamour and artistic advertising. It was one of the first companies to attract customers with football cards.

But Heinz had other dreams. From a young age, he showed extraordinary musical talent, composing songs, operettas and dance music. His first public performance was in Wiesbaden in 1904, aged just 16.

By 18 he had presented a three-act operetta, Prinzpapa. A 1908 review described him as ‘a young rival to Lehar… In the not-too-distant future, one can say that this or that polka, or a certain waltz style, is an ‘authentic Heinz Lewin.’’

In 1912, Heinz married Jenny Trabsky. His growing prestige was evident: they held a civil ceremony in St Pancras, London, followed by a banquet at the Trocadero in Piccadilly as well as a chuppah [wedding] and dinner in a prestigious Wiesbaden hotel. 

Drafted into the German army during the first World War, Heinz served as a truck driver until an injury brought him home. He returned to both the cigarette factory and his music.

My mother’s father Ralph was born in 1914. He shared few memories of his childhood, but he recalled ruling musical staves on blank paper for his father while Heinz composed at the piano – with a parrot perched on his shoulder.

From 1925 to 1936, Heinz’s success took him to Berlin. He went on to write the soundtracks to silent movies. His compositions were included in the early talkies in Germany and France, and later in the 1930s Hollywood remakes of European films.

He became a member of Schlaraffia Berolina, a cosmopolitan society of artists that mimicked a medieval Teutonic court. It was banned in 1937. As life for Jews in Germany darkened, Heinz adopted the pen name Henri Letton and moved to France.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, he was interned as an enemy alien. He was sent to the labour camp at Septfonds in Vichy France — a camp for political prisoners and Jews.

The commandant of the Jewish prisoners was Capitaine Prévôt. Acknowledging that his prisoners included intellectuals and talented artists, he encouraged them. In June 1942 Prévôt arranged a fundraising gala concert to support the camp and the neighbourhood. It was under the musical direction of my great-grandfather. 

Through researching Septfonds survivors’ literature and archives 15 years ago, my mother connected with two of the youngest prisoners. Jules Fainzanc had sung in the concert. He would later survive five death-marches. Henri Lichtenstein worked in the communications room and was in the neighbouring barracks to Heinz. In August 1942, it was Lichtenstein who took the fateful order that the Septfonds camp was to be emptied of its Jewish inmates.

They recalled that Prévôt kept back his ‘concert Jews’ for two extra days to allow for one final performance. But on the night of 3 September 1942, Heinz was one of 211 names on the train from Septfonds to Drancy. On 9 September, he was listed among a thousand deported to Auschwitz on Convoy 30. And there, Heinz perished. But his story doesn’t end. 

Capitaine Prévôt was a meticulous man. He recorded the camp’s day-to-day activities in his diaries. Prévôt’s archive was recently purchased from his family by local historian and councillor Jean Marc Labarta. Not only had Prévôt encouraged the artists in the camp, he had retained the prisoners’ cartoons of him and also their musical scores.

The words of the prisoners’ march underscore the strain of their work and yet a spirit which is unbroken.

Reveille, refrain, in sunshine and rain, 
We march with songs on our lips.
With pickaxe and shovels 
We work in the forests, in fields and meadows
All happiness forgotten, 
Hard at work, the day is so long,
Tirelessly, we toil but always with good heart [humour].
Marching through villages and sleepy landscapes, 
Singing this same tune.

Beautiful watercolours cover musical scores of compositions written in the camp by Heinz Lewin. Behind the illustrations are original compositions, dances and songs, written by the grandfather my mother never knew.
A Rumba d’Amour, a passionate dance of love, was written in Septfonds – music, written and performed in the darkness of captivity by those who yet dreamed of liberation.

A cartoon from 1941 and a photograph from 1942 show Heinz at the piano. The musical ensemble of the Septfonds camp was preparing for the gala concert.

Souviens-Toi
Remember! My darling.
Our kisses, so tender, Cherie!
Your hand in mine… Nostalgia fades away…
Light, triumphant, rises.
My torments suddenly calm down at the day’s end.
Hopes and confidences fill my healing heart.

We read in his diaries that Prévôt made a special note to thank Heinz for his work.

Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz and almost 83 years since Heinz composed his final works, his music has premiered in London; performed for the very first time to an audience of free men and women, to survivors and their families.

Though his creativity and dreams were extinguished by the Nazis, Heinz lives on today in newly discovered music and before new audiences; certainly, beyond anything, beyond any family Heinz might ever have imagined.

Click here to listen to Heinz Lewin’s Rumba d’Amour composed in Septfonds Camp.

At the end of my G2G presentations, I include an extract of a duo for violin and viola written by my maternal grandfather, Hans Neumeyer (1887-1944). He had a brilliant musical mind and composed a lot of music between the wars, but virtually his entire output went up in smoke in 1940s Berlin, during Allied bombing. 

Hans was blind from the age of 13. Despite his blindness, or perhaps because of it, he developed great musical skill that was to gain his admission in 1904 at the age of 17 to the Academy of Music in Munich, where he studied harmony, counterpoint and composition.

Contacts in Hans’s musical world

After graduating he wrote academic works, composed and taught. One of his many music colleagues was Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, who established a celebrated school of eurhythmics (a kind of improvised movement method responding to rhythm, improvisation and tempi) at Hellerau, near Dresden, where Hans taught and played the piano. Here he met Vera Ephraim, one of the students and his future wife (my grandmother). Another student, an English woman called Beatrice, was later the hugely important contact that enabled my mother Ruth and uncle Raymond to flee Nazi Germany in 1939 on a Kindertransport to England. 

My grandparents moved into the town of Dachau after marrying in 1920. Their house, where Ruth and Raymond were brought up, was always full of music – with musicians coming to play chamber music with Hans, himself an extremely accomplished pianist who must have learnt his music through braille or by ear. Both Vera and Hans gave lessons. Vera and Hans were both to perish later in the Holocaust. 

In the 1930s Hans met a Jewish violinist called Dela Mankiewitz, who in 1933 married Helge Blakmar, a future Danish resistance leader. Dela became Hans’s secretary and collaborator, sharing musical ideas and writing down his compositions as he dictated them. 

In 2022, I received an astonishing email from a woman in Sweden, who had discovered in her basement a box containing over fifty passionate love letters written by Hans to Dela in 1937. There are numerous references to pieces he was writing, including three sonatas (though he doesn’t say for which instrument). Dela says she and Hans were collaborating on a ‘great work’, but we will never know what it was to be.

Two pieces for his children

After Ruth and Raymond’s departure to England on the Kindertransport, Hans composed two pieces for them and sent them via a contact in Switzerland: a Christmas song written for Raymond in December 1939, and two little recorder duets written for Ruth in Easter 1940 when she was living in Cambridge with a family whose daughter Jane became an instant best friend. 

Continuing to the end

On Red Cross messages sent from Germany to England in 1940 and 1941, Vera mentions that Hans is still very much engaged in his music: ‘Father composes many flute and other pieces’.

Hans was deported to Theresienstadt in June 1942, but despite his blindness survived for two years before dying there of a lung disease. A group of Czech music students befriended him and nicknamed him ‘The Professor’. Hans gave them music lessons, while they looked after him and made sure he was getting fed. One of them, Thomas Mandl, survived and became a concert violinist. He never forgot Hans’s extraordinary musical intellect. Hans taught his Theresienstadt pupils basic four-part and eight-part harmony exercises, eight-beat physical exercises, intonation and rhythmic exercises. 

Mandl last saw him in the block washroom and was shocked at his expression of utter dejection and some sort of strange wild premonition. In May 1944 he heard of his death and enquired about the day of the funeral. It was a sunny day: three of Hans’s pupils were among those who saw his crudely made coffin placed among the others on a truck and followed it to the barrier on the edge of the camp, which was as far as they were allowed to go. The barrier came down; ‘That was the way our dead left us’.

Aftermath

Hans’s death hit Dela badly. She barely spoke about the war after that, though she kept his picture in her front hall. She wrote to a friend, ‘It’s not as good as things were. It’s really hard for me to get over Hans’ departure.’ 
In 1943 Dela fled on a boat from Denmark to avoid deportation by the Nazis. The boat, pursued by a Nazi gun boat, had engine trouble but fortunately a favourable wind blew it into Swedish waters, and they were safe. Dela spent the rest of her life in Sweden.

She took on that voyage the only two pieces of Hans’s music that she had left, and thus these were saved for posterity. One was a duo ‘DBSG’ for violin and viola, written in 1940 – the opening notes are D, B (the German for B flat), S (E flat) and G, representing the initials of Dela Blakmar and an unknown musician friend, SG (a violist, I assume), to whom it was dedicated. (Click here to hear the haunting second movement.) The other piece is a trio for strings in four movements, opening with a sombre slow introduction on the cello (click here to hear the entire piece).

My mother told me that listening to the few works of his that survive was the one chance I had to hear his voice – through his music. What little remains of his output is tantalising, and I’d love to think there’s more of it somewhere, perhaps lurking in a synagogue or a dusty archive.

Selected posts from my blog posts (click on these links):

Thomas Mandl’s memories of Hans in Theresienstadt
Hans’s love letters to Dela
Tributes to Hans from fellow musicians
A prewar connection with other musicians

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