Krystallnacht and Violins of Hope

"Kristallnacht was a pivotal event of the Holocaust; it was the end of the beginning."
" Before, it had been about destroying the Jewish community in Germany and, after that, they destroyed the people."
Rabbi and scholar Michael Berenbaum

"I think it's so meaningful to get to play these instruments. It's extremely emotional and sometimes difficult from that perspective: You hear the story of these instruments and then you have to play."
"You feel the connection with the former owner. You understand that this instrument was this person's voice during the war -- and that you get to keep that voice alive."
Concert violinist Niv Ashkenazi

Concert violinist Niv Ashkenazi and a Violin of Hope, an instrument reclaimed from the Holocaust. Elyse Freliger / OTTwp

"That was the heart of the problem of German Jewry: It was so much a part of German society that the Nazi blow hit it from within. Until 1938 my parents never thought of leaving Germany. 'There's no way the Germans we live with will continue to do these things. It's only an episode'." 
"That was the atmosphere. It was also the atmosphere on Kristallnacht. They couldn't comprehend it. It came as a blow. I remember my mother standing pale and crying… I remember her phoning her gentile friends – she had more gentile friends than Jewish friends – No answer. No one answered her."
Historian and Holocaust survivor Prof. Zvi Bacharach

In Ottawa, Carleton University's Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship under director Mina Cohn decided this year that they would commemorate Krystallnacht 80 years after the two-day pogrom that took place throughout Germany, Austria and Sudetenland, through music; in the words of Ms. Cohn, to pay tribute "to the six million whose voices were silenced forever by the Holocaust." Referred to most often at "the Night of Broken Glass", it represented the signal to Jews that what their imagination could not conceivably verify was about to overtake their trust in a country they loved and felt themselves an integral part of.

Amnon Weinstein, an Israeli, emigrated from Poland to Israel in 1938, the year before World War two broke out. He is now recognized as one of the world's foremost violin makers. Many years ago a Holocaust survivor brought a violin to the master violin maker in hopes he could restore it. The owner of the violin explained to Mr. Weinstein that he had been forced to play his violin while Nazis marched fellow Jews to their deaths. Examining the violin left for him to work on, he was overcome with emotion when he discovered inside the violin case, ashes.

Since that time he began amassing a collection of stringed instruments owned and played in wartime camps and ghettos by Jews. He used his expertise to painstakingly restore them with the vision that they could be used on concert stages around the world; in effect giving a voice to each instrument that once spoke to the plight of Jews awaiting rescue from the vast depths of the nightmare they had been plunged into. The violin maker refurbished a personal collection of 50 instruments that he had amassed.

He named his collection Violins of Hope. Born out of his vision of the instruments speaking of the tragedy, themselves survivors giving hope to all those who have vowed never to forget, and never to allow the world to forget the desolation of world Jewry when none heard their pleas for rescue from the killing machine of Nazi Germany. During Krystallnacht thousands of Jewish synagogues, businesses and homes were plundered and destroyed in a massive pogrom that took place on November 9 and 10, 1938.

Killed outright in the paroxysms of violence were 91 Jews, with over 30,000 Jewish men rounded up by the Gestapo and SS personnel, to be sent to concentration camps. Once the mass atrocity was concluded Nazi authorities placed 'blame' for the pogrom on the victims and Jews faced the imposition of an "atonement tax", where insurance payouts were confiscated to ensure that German insurers would not suffer any losses. Some 267 synagogues were destroyed, many torched and burned while firefighters stood by.

"That effort began to take the form of radical exclusionary laws and, ultimately, systematic and structural murder", following Krystallnacht, installing and authorizing a more strenuous persecution and unending violence against Jews, leading toward the extermination of a people in Europe whom Nazi Germany identified as a plague that had to be destroyed. As former director of the U.S. Holocaust Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Professor Berenbaum spoke with the authority of one whose passion for ensuring the deaths of six million not be forgotten rests with all who care.

Violinist Niv Ashkenazi will perform with one of the instruments that violin maker Mr. Weinstein had restored, appearing for that purpose at an Ottawa synagogue, Kehillat Beth Israel. The instrument he will use has an inlaid Star of David on its back.