Fairfield students get 'surreal' musical history lesson with instruments from the Holocaust

Relics of Jewish history came to life in the hands of Fairfield students this week as a collection of stringed instruments with ties to the Holocaust made their rounds through the area.

Fairfield Warde and Ludlowe high schools received a set of violins, a cello and viola — part of the preserved collection known as the "Violins of Hope," which Jews played before and during the Holocaust.

The instruments, based in Tel Aviv, regularly travel to be played around the world. They arrived in Fairfield County this month, stopping at schools, places of worship, and other community centers, including a performance at the Norwalk Symphony Orchestra on Saturday.

A group of eight Fairfield high school students — three at Fairfield Warde Wednesday and five at Fairfield Ludlowe Friday — played the instruments in their auditoriums, each filled with other students from music, history and English classes.

"Thank you all so much for being here to bear witness to a unique and experiential way to one of the darkest chapters in human history," Mindy Hersh, a Fairfield Ludlowe parent who volunteers at the Holocaust Resource Center for the Jewish Federation of Greater Fairfield County, said to students Friday. "Only this time, there's a twist because you'll also have the opportunity to experience something beautiful and hopeful."

Instruments from the Holocaust 

Hersh, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, introduced Fairfield Ludlowe students to the backstory of the Violins of Hope alongside her daughter — Fairfield Ludlowe senior Julia Walters, who founded the school's Jewish Culture Club and has looked to bring Jewish programming to students.

Hersh explained how violins were "deeply embedded" in Jewish culture, part of the belongings families carried when they were forced out of their homes during Nazi Party rule and even played in concentration camps, where they would keep prisoners calm on their marches to death or to work in the camps.

She said the SS guards ordered the formation of a women's orchestra in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp in 1943, where members would spend up to 10 hours a day rehearsing to play music for them. The Nazis would often spare those who could play music, allowing the violins to save thousands of lives during the party's regime, she added.

Before each Fairfield Ludlowe student took the stage to play one of the instruments, Hersh and Walters told their stories. One of the violins belonged to a shopping center owner whom the Nazis once marched naked down a main street in Germany with other prominent Jews before taking over his business, a sign in the auditorium stated.

Walters said the viola and cello belonged to members of the "Palestine Orchestra," which was made of top Jewish musicians from European orchestras who lost their positions when the Nazis assumed power and enforced racial restrictions.

After World War II, Walters recounted that most musicians in Israel wanted nothing to do with their German-made instruments. When they approached Moshe Weinstein, who started collecting the instruments that became the Violins of Hope, she said they threatened to break or burn whatever he didn't buy.

"After 50 years, these silent violins have come back to life," Walters said.

After their performances, the Violins of Hope and the students who played them joined a larger orchestra of more than two dozen Fairfield Ludlowe students. They created a symphony of sounds, with instruments transcending historical eras nearly a century apart.

At Fairfield Warde Wednesday, juniors Mark Cassa, Anaya D'Souza, and Jasper Gallas played the instruments in front of orchestra, choir, band, history, English, and Jewish culture classes. Students watched as D'Souza and Cassa played the violin and Gallas, the cello.

Fairfield Warde Head Principal Paul Cavanna said their performances followed a presentations from social studies teachers, then from Avshi Weinstein, a third-generation violinmaker of the collection's founding family who is now in charge of the Violins of Hope.

"You could really hear a pin drop in the auditorium," Cavanna said. "It was very, very moving. I'm just so proud of them and appreciate them giving their time to be able to do this. It was really awesome to see kind of history come alive. And you look out, and you see these teenagers like jaw-dropping, paying 100 percent attention."

Cassa said the violin, on which he played Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 3, had been made in honor of about 1,600 Jews who died in a single day in Poland. Both Fairfield performances came days after Kristallnacht, which commemorates one of the first outbreaks of violence against Jewish people in Nazi Germany, but students said the instruments also raised a spirit of hope and joy, having survived the Holocaust and living on through their music decades later.

"It was a surreal experience understanding that one instrument could hold that much life, death and power in just one object," Cassa said. "And it made it for a very special and almost heartbreaking experience to understand all the pain and suffering that someone had been through, but at the same time it was really special to me to know that this violin was dedicated to all of those lives lost so that it could inspire many others in the future."

The Fairfield high schools were two of at least five in the region to place the Violins of Hope in students' hands during their weeklong tour through Fairfield County, according to local Jewish leaders. Schools in Weston, Wilton, and Bridgeport also hosted the instruments, as did the Bennett Center for Judaic Studies at Fairfield University, according to an itinerary on the Jewish Federation of Greater Fairfield County's website.

Other appearances include local Shabbat services and multiple stops in Bridgeport at a music nonprofit, a Jewish senior center, and the Sacred Heart University Discovery Science Center and Planetarium.