Ashes to Light

A Holocaust Childhood to a Life in Music

Nelly Ben-Or MBE

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781788313094
• eBook ISBN: 9781786723819
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Born into a Jewish family in Lvov, Poland in the early-1930s, Nelly Ben-Or was to experience, at a very young age, the trauma of the Holocaust. This narrative of her life's journey describes the survival of Nelly, her mother and her older sister. With help from family and friends, Nelly and her mother were smuggled out of the Ghetto in Lvov and escaped to Warsaw with false identity papers where they were under constant threat of discovery. Miraculously, they survived being taken on a train to Auschwitz, deported not, in fact, because they were Jews, but as citizens of Warsaw following the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis. After the end of the war, Nelly's musical talent was free to flourish, at first in Poland and then in the recently-created State of Israel, where Nelly completed her musical studies as a scholarship student at the Music Academy in Jerusalem. Following her move to England she carried out a full concert career and also discovered the Alexander Technique for piano playing, which had a profound influence on her. Today Nelly Ben-Or is internationally regarded as the leading exponent of the application of principles of the Alexander Technique - she teaches in the keyboard department of London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama, runs Alexander Technique masterclasses and regularly gives talks about her Holocaust experience. This unique memoir is testimony to an extraordinary life and illustrates the strength of the human condition when faced with adversity.

PART I

THE WAR YEARS

CHAPTER 1

1 September 1939 – Nazis Invade Poland

Friday afternoon – Mother in the midst of Sabbath preparations. There are smells of baking challah, chicken soup simmering and gefilte fish cooking in a dish. The usual Friday afternoon activities in readiness for the Eve of Sabbath. Then suddenly – noise, confusion, explosions of bombs, an unexpected feeling of anxiety; people rushing out of their homes bewildered, asking each other what is happening? The news spreads like an icy wind – war; Hitler has attacked Poland. These are Nazi aeroplanes dropping bombs on the city.

Those were the first moments of what was to turn into more than five years of darkness. The warmth and security of a Jewish home, the closeness of the family, was soon to be shattered. Fear, anxiety, loss and pain were to become the predominant experiences in our lives. And the shadow of violent, cruel, inhuman death was to be cast over our daily experience and enter the depths of our disturbed dreams.

I was a little girl, just six years old. Our home was a small apartment in Królowej Jadwigi – one of the quieter central streets of the Polish city of Lwów (also formerly known as Lemberg, its German name; it is now called Lviv, and is in the Ukraine). There was my parents’ bedroom with a balcony overlooking the street, the adjoining room with a couch for my sister and a small bed for me, and a large kitchen-living room with a partitioned part containing the cooking area. The sliding doors of the partition were a tempting attraction to play with. The apartment building had an inner courtyard with a balcony running outside the kitchen door. It was on that balcony that I later stood pressed in fear against my mother’s skirt watching the Nazis carry out all the lovely belongings of our home. I remember them taking away the piano.

My only sister Fryderyka, or ‘Frydzia’ as she was called, was about 14. Mother and Father, who were in their thirties, kept a traditional Jewish home. A young Ukrainian peasant girl lived with us to help with some of the housework.

Mother must have been very pretty with dark brown eyes, black hair and a well-shaped face. She devoted all her time to looking after us and to her own creative way of running our home. Mother was most gifted and creative in all manner of embroidery, knitting and crochet work. Almost all of the clothes worn by Frydzia and me were handmade and hand-embroidered. I can remember dresses, blouses, petticoats, all made in a variety of styles and patterns of embroidery. There were sweaters, shawls, muffs, gloves, hats and socks: all Mother’s own exquisitely expert work. One could tell the difference in quality and finesse of workmanship between the things she made for us and those ready-made, which others wore. This was but a small part of the output of her creativity. Our modest apartment was decorated with Mother’s handcrafted items, the products of endless hours of her work. There was not a single window curtain that was not adorned by Mother’s own embroidery, lace or fringe; not a bed, nor sofa, covered in anything but spreads of beautiful fabric decorated by her embroidery, petit-points, or appliqué work. The same was true of all our tablecloths, napkins, pillow cases and sheets. Mother also produced small- and large-scale picture embroidery as wall hangings, or framed pictures. In our living room hung one of Mother’s finest and largest tapestries – a most colourfully embroidered picture of Little Red Riding Hood carrying her basket through the woods. This one seemed to please Mother most and she enjoyed showing it as one of her best works. It hung over the object of special significance and affection in our family – the piano. That is one of my first memories of the instrument which was later to become so central in my life.

My father is a much more elusive figure in my memory. He travelled much as a sales representative of a large firm called Hardtmuth, which manufactured fine fountain pens and pencils. A fountain pen was to me, then, a symbol of adulthood. Children used crayons, and only later learned to write properly with pen and ink. Father used to come home for the Sabbath arriving on Friday evenings with special treats for the family. I can remember the delicious taste of halva brought by him, or the special flavour of kosher ‘ham’. On my birthday, just a few months before the outbreak of the war, he gave me a beautiful children’s edition of The Odyssey. The story of the one-eyed Cyclops left somewhere a lasting impression in my memory.

Ours was a warm, cosy, safe-feeling family. The formal traditions of a Jewish home were kept quite assiduously. We ate kosher food, kept the Sabbath, and celebrated all the Jewish festivals; my parents could read Hebrew prayers – and we went to the synagogue. Friday night, the Eve of Sabbath, was the highlight of the week, with Mother preparing lovely traditional meals and baking her own challah (the plaited Sabbath bread). She lit candles before the meal, and I remember her covering her hair with a scarf and saying a blessing over the candlelight, standing in front of it, hands covering her face. There was a feeling of a special atmosphere of the Holy day in our home. I can remember my father with the prayer shawl over his shoulders, his head covered and wearing the ‘tefillim’ (phylacteries) on his forehead, saying his prayers in the corner of the room.

My sister was several years older than me. She was the pretty one of the family, with lovely dark brown eyes and rich black hair. She was very musical, played the piano and had a lovely soprano singing voice. She was lively, intelligent and of a sparkling temperament. As a little girl, I looked up to her as the model of female attractiveness and inevitably wanted to emulate her. She was sent to a Jewish Hebrew-speaking school. It was for my sister that our parents bought a piano, a tremendous luxury for a family with only a modest income. Soon after the instrument was installed in our home I began to be drawn to it, making up harmonies to accompany the songs which my sister sang. Noticing my musicality, she began to give me my first instruction in reading music, which soon led to my being taken to a teacher at the age of about five. I remember the times before we had this magical instrument in our home – I used to arrange a small stool as a ‘piano’ and sit on a lower one next to it ‘playing’ imaginary piano music with great abandon…!

It was soon obvious that I had a real musical gift and my passion for music – with a special love of the piano – began to manifest itself. I made rapid strides in learning to play. After a short while, the teacher transferred me to a more advanced class and there was talk around me about my gift as a little pianist. It looked as if my vocation had been found and the future was clearly mapped out for me. Piano pieces succeeded one another swiftly. In a youth concert, I played some pieces from Tchaikovsky’s ‘Album for the Young’. But this was all before 1st September 1939.

That fateful day in my childhood marked the beginning of a period of more than five years of frightening events, great anxiety and with the shadow of death hovering over us all. Suddenly the peaceful flow of our lives was shattered. We began to live in fear, running into cellars to shelter from air raids. This, however, soon turned out to be not the worst compared with what was yet to come. From that day the warm, safe feeling of childhood life was destroyed and a succession of frightening, inexplicable experiences followed one another. Life turned into endless stretches of threatening situations. There was the fear and threat of fighting going on around us and hunger, with fewer and fewer food products available. Even that was by no means the worst. Gradually we began to discover that there was something fundamentally ‘wrong’ with us. We were Jews. This became at first a derogatory word, then a term of persecution and in the end a death sentence.

My father, Leon, was one of two sons of a very orthodox Jewish family. The family name was Podhoretz. His brother was married and had a son and daughter; they must have been of early school age just before the war broke out. My recollection of Father’s family is not very detailed and centres mainly around his parents whom I remember as being old and dressed in traditionally orthodox garments with grandmother wearing a scheitel (wig), as all orthodox married women did, and grandfather a long black coat and round hat with a large fur rim, underneath which one could see his single hairlock by the side of each cheek. I learned many years after the war that my paternal grandfather was a synagogue cantor, with a very fine voice.

I have much more vivid memories of Mother’s family, the Lindens. There were four brothers and three sisters, my mother being the middle one of the sisters. The family seems to have had much talent and lively ‘esprit’. They were also extremely good looking and the sons had great charm and liked, and were liked by, ladies. The same was true of their very impressive looking handsome father, my grandfather, Isidor. Life was perhaps rough for my grandmother Leah Helen, who must have gone through some extremely hard times while bringing up her large family, often on slim resources. She was schooled in basic Judaism, could read Hebrew prayers well and was quite observant in her ways but was not as orthodox as my father’s parents were. I remember her from my early childhood as being in charge of a large farmhouse in a village where my grandfather looked after a country estate belonging to a Polish landowner.

My mother, speaking in praise of the resilience and strong character of her own mother, used to tell a story which illustrated my grandmother’s sharpness of mind. Apparently a woman came to Grandma Helen – ‘Babcia’ as we called her – to tell her of my grandfather’s philandering exploits. She asked Babcia whether she knew that her husband had given a lovely fur coat to the attractive blonde woman in the next village. Without a moment’s hesitation or expression of annoyance, Babcia replied ‘What a pity you don’t look like that blonde or he would have given you a fur coat too!’

Uncle Tadeusz, the youngest son, followed in my grandfather’s footsteps. His interests lay in agriculture and he eventually received a degree in agronomy. One brother, Janek, became a bank employee and later in 1944 died with the resistance fighters during the Warsaw Uprising. Another brother went as an apprentice to a watchmaker and jeweller from an early age, and was soon earning well and even helping his parents financially. He was Uncle Max, who became very successful in business and later, during the war, played a most important part in supporting financially (and through that helping to save from annihilation) his own immediate family, my family and a great number of other people who would otherwise have perished under the Nazi occupation. It was Uncle Max whom I remember best from my childhood, partly because he survived the war and also as I have spent time with him on several occasions since then.

The summers of those early years of my life constitute some of my happiest memories. My grandparents’ children and grandchildren would go down to their home in a country village in eastern Poland in the vicinity of Lwów, where we all stayed through the summer. Being there, close to nature, living amongst gardens, orchards, domestic and farm animals, was a rich experience for us children as we were used to living in town apartments or houses for most of the year. Those summers of my early childhood have left in me a feeling of yearning for being in the countryside; nostalgia for all we children experienced during those long spells in my grandparents’ home: picking huge baskets of cherries, plums, pears, and apples in the orchards, playing in the fields and nearby woods – a setting which gave free rein to our imagination. Some of us, clad in garlands of field flowers and daisy chains, created dramatic presentations of fairy tales. There was magic around us. Memories of the scents, sights and sounds of the countryside in the summer have remained with me always. I remember vividly the violence of occasional spectacular thunderstorms, when we children huddled in corners of the house which seemed so safe to us. That search for safe hiding places was later to assume a terrifying reality.

CHAPTER 2

Beginnings of the Nightmare

Prior to Hitler’s conquest of Poland in September 1939, he had concluded a political agreement with Stalin in which they pledged friendship and non-aggression. As part of this pact, the eastern area of Poland, including our city, came under Russian control. There is a Polish saying: ‘Z deszczu pod rynne’ which means ‘From the rain under the gutter’ – in other words, ‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire’. Many people began to suffer under the Stalinist regime: they lost their rights, their property and personal freedom. Many were arrested and deported, mostly to Siberia. Anyone who could be even remotely described as part of the aristocracy or bourgeoisie became the victim of Stalin’s regime. However Jews, especially if they were not rich or politically influential before the start of the war, were left in relative peace. It was during that time that I began learning a little Russian. There seemed to be relatively little change in my family’s way of life then.

However, in 1941, the situation changed with Hitler’s offensives against the Russians. Ignoring their pact, Germany attacked Russia, and pushed the Soviet troops out of eastern Poland, including Lwów. That year, in June, a German order was issued for the extermination of Jews. Some people who dreaded the prospect of the Nazis taking over our part of Poland packed what they could of their personal belongings and began to head further eastwards into Russia. Years later I heard that my father had suggested to Mother that we should also join those who were escaping from the on-coming Germans and follow the retreating Red Army. My mother looked around at the home she had so devotedly created, the home which bore so many marks of her talents: the extraordinary embroidery, and all manner of lovely handmade things on which she had spent endless hours of work. ‘How could we abandon our home and just go on a truck somewhere towards the unknown?’ she said, and refused to leave. I never asked her later if she regretted that decision, but Father did not survive to judge whether it had been the right one. Many Jewish people did in fact survive as refugees in Russia, but the hard labour, hunger and cold claimed many victims amongst them too.

For those of us who stayed in Poland to experience the presence of Hitler’s Nazis, a state of hell on earth gradually unfolded. The first act of degradation which the German occupiers perpetrated was to force all Jewish people, from the youngest to the oldest, to wear around the arm a white band with the blue Star of David sewn onto it. This marked out the Jewish people from the rest of the population and it made anyone wearing the accursed band an easy target for abuse and persecution.

Quite soon after the German occupation of eastern Poland, one of the first things we experienced was the brutal dispossession of most of our belongings. One day I stood holding on to my mother’s skirt as Germans in uniform burst into our home, took everything of value, anything which looked attractive and carted it away as if we had absolutely no right to own what my parents had worked so hard for. I remember a lovely pink porcelain coffee set, all attractive dishes and especially Mother’s hand-embroidered wall hangings, tablecloths, bed covers and framed pictures. My mother had spent years of work, denying herself perhaps the pleasure of going out, in order to adorn her nest with her own gifted work. Now it was all suddenly taken away. Finally – the worst thing for me – our piano was removed too. I shivered in fear and despair, huddled against my mother’s body as I watched them taking away the instrument which had become for me such a wonderful source of magic. We were left impoverished and degraded, people considered blemished by our Jewish heritage, sub-human, deserving no rights, creatures against whom all insults, cruelty and depravity were apparently justified. The endless succession of humiliating, intimidating and terrifying events had begun.

There were three groups of people amongst the Germans (and not just in Poland): the Wehrmacht were the soldiers of the army, composed of volunteers and conscripts from a range of backgrounds; these were the least frightening. The SS (Schutzstaffel) were the highly trained stormtroopers who were engaged in special tasks, such as guarding the Fuhrer and other leading Nazis, rounding up Jews and other ‘undesirables’ and guarding the concentration and extermination camps. They wore identifying insignia on their uniforms. The Gestapo were the most feared. They were the so-called ‘secret police’ and would torture prisoners to gather information about the whereabouts of Jews and resistance fighters, agents and other so-called ‘enemies of the state’. They also wore identifying uniforms and insignia.

Later, in November 1941, we were forced to leave our home altogether and move into a very cramped one-room dwelling within the part of the outskirts of the town designated to be the official ghetto for all the Jews of Lwów. There was a high brick wall with broken glass lacing the top of it, together with barbed wire; all this was constructed around the entire ghetto to prevent anyone from escaping. Heavily armed SS men stood guard at different points along the wall. Within the ghetto people from different parts of the city were bundled together, rich and poor, young and old, the most highly educated together with the illiterate ones, Jews who, in pre-war times, hardly knew their Jewish heritage, together with the most strictly orthodox. All of us were thrown into this prison together, to await our impending annihilation. The Nazi ‘scientific’ mentality and sense of ‘practical order’ bled every bit of usable energy out of us while we were still alive in the ghetto. All able-bodied and young people were driven in truck-loads, under heavy SS guard, out of the ghetto early each morning to work on projects for the German army: some sewing German uniforms, others working in various other production schemes. Each evening the truck-loads of exhausted, hungry and frightened people would be brought back and ‘dumped’ in the ghetto for the night, to be picked up again the following dawn. They were the lucky ones – although kept in terror, as long as they could be exploited to do unpaid labour and fed on less than the minimum of the most basic food, they were not immediately exterminated. It is amazing how each person clung to every day of living. Or was it the fear of the kind of end to which our lives were to come that caused us to make such superhuman efforts to cling to life?

My own family – Mother, Father, my sister and I – were cooped up in a small house divided between several families. I remember one room in which we all lived and a corner in a corridor where Mother prepared whatever minimal amounts of food came our way. This was a time of complete deprivation. And it was a time of constant fear of what each day or even hour would bring.

Our existence in the confines of the ghetto was fraught with constant anxiety, which at moments grew into virtually paralysing terror. The Nazis were continually supplying a flow of humans for the concentration camps. The most dreaded of those we heard of were Auschwitz (Oświęcim), Majdanek, Treblinka and Belz.ec in Poland. Although I was around eight years of age at the time, I knew these names and overheard frightening conversations in which people were passing on stories that somehow got out of the camps. I knew that no one could remain alive in them. I knew that each inmate was put to death by being taken to a gas chamber. I knew that prior to this horrendous death there was an existence in inhumane conditions with extremely hard labour, almost no food, appalling sanitary conditions, torture and cruelty. Somehow this information got out. Somehow I, a child who in the normal course of life would not have understood even the language describing such things, overheard these conversations ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: The War Years
• Part II: Poland 1945–50
• Part III: Israel 1950–60
• Part IV: England From
• Postscript
• Appendix I: Holocaust Memorial Day Notes from School Pupils
• Appendix II: Some Memorabilia from a Musical Career
• Bibliography