Newsletter for Generation 2 Generation

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

G2G Upcoming Events

Recent Events

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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