Esther Bejarano, a survivor of the Auschwitz
concentration camp, may be the last thing you’d expect in a hip-hop
singer. She uses her music to spread a message against fascism.
Credit Heribert Proepper/Associated Press
BERLIN — AT various points during shows, the German rapper Kutlu Yurtseven gestures to a bandmate
sitting demurely off to the side. That’s the cue for 89-year-old Esther
Bejarano, a diminutive woman with a snow-white pixie cut, to jump in with a song.
“When will the heavens open up, again, for me?” is one favorite, the
refrain of a local carnival tune. “When will they open up?”
It
is an unusual pairing. Ms. Bejarano is one of the last surviving
members of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, the only all-female ensemble
among the many Nazi-run prisoner musical groups in the camp system.
Among other duties, the Girls’ Orchestra was responsible for playing the
marches that imprisoned women had to keep step to as they went out to
work in the morning and, even more cruelly, as they returned, half-dead,
at the end of the day.
Five
years ago, hoping to reach more young people with her story and her
message of tolerance and anti-fascism, Ms. Bejarano teamed up with
Microphone Mafia, a German hip-hop duo with Turkish and Italian roots.
They have released their first album, and have been playing concerts
throughout Germany and Europe ever since.
The
music combines songs like the poignant Yiddish resistance song, “We’ll
Live Forever,” composed in the Nazi-run Jewish ghetto in Vilna just
before it was liquidated, with rap passages about current problems like
racism that, in Ms. Bejarano’s view, show that the lessons of the
Holocaust still need to be learned.
Performances
always begin with Ms. Bejarano reading aloud from her autobiography,
which tells the story of a life shaped by two forces: the Nazis and
music.
Ms.
Bejarano was born Esther Loewy in Saarlouis, in what is now
southwestern Germany, in 1924. Her parents had met in Berlin as
teenagers, when her father was hired as a piano teacher for her mother,
and the two fell in love. “I picture it as having been very lovely,” Ms.
Bejarano said with a smile.
Hitler’s
rise to power put an end to what Ms. Bejarano described as “a
lighthearted childhood.” By the time she was 16, she was separated from
her family and interned in a Nazi work camp outside Berlin. Her parents,
she learned later, were deported the same year to Riga, Latvia, where
they were shot.
In
1943, she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her hair was cut off, and
she was tattooed and forced to do backbreaking labor. For extra food,
she sometimes sang songs by Schubert, Bach or Mozart for barracks
leaders.
The
Nazis regarded camp orchestras as status symbols, and, within a month
of Ms. Bejarano’s arrival in Auschwitz, Maria Mandl, the SS commander in
charge of the women’s camp, decided that she, too, wanted one.
When
approached, Ms. Bejarano said she could play the piano. There was no
piano, she was told, but they needed an accordion player. “I had never
held an accordion in my hands, before,” Ms. Bejarano said. “But I said I
could play one.”
It worked, and she was accepted into the orchestra. “To this day I can’t believe that I did it.”
In
addition to entertaining SS officers with popular ditties or classical
selections, the Girls’ Orchestra also had to play for new detainees
arriving for the gas chambers. Often, people smiled and waved at the
musicians. “They must have thought, ‘Where music is playing, things
can’t be that bad,’ ” Ms. Bejarano said. “They didn’t know where they
were going. But we knew. We played with tears in our eyes.”
BECAUSE
fewer female than male prisoners could play musical instruments,
members of the orchestra received somewhat better treatment than their
male counterparts, and Ms. Bejarano was able to survive two serious
illnesses.
After
six months in Auschwitz, new regulations allowed her to transfer to a
labor camp because she had a Christian grandmother. During a forced
march in the last days of the war, she and several friends hid in the
woods and escaped. After a few harrowing months traveling Germany on
foot, dodging Russian soldiers and searching for her family, she
acquired false papers and boarded a ship headed to what was then British
Palestine. There, she reunited with her sister, Tosca.
While
some who played in the camps and survived never touched an instrument
again, for Ms. Bejarano, there was never any question: As soon as she
left Germany, she began training as a singer. “Some people say, after
Auschwitz, you can’t write any more poems, there can’t be music,
beautiful pictures,” she said. “I think that’s completely wrong. We have
to express to people what happened to us.”
For
many years, though, Ms. Bejarano was unable to talk about her time in
the camps. In Israel, where she settled, she sang in an award-winning
workers’ choir, and gave hundreds of concerts as a soldier in the army.
She met and married Nissim Bejarano, a truck driver whose family had
immigrated from Bulgaria. They had two children. She taught local
children to play the recorder.
But, in 1960, after much soul searching, the Bejarano family left for Germany: Her husband had fought during the 1956 Suez crisis
and was morally opposed to further armed conflict with Israel’s
neighbors. Settled in Hamburg, Ms. Bejarano had no time for music. She
cared for her small children and later, with her husband, ran a laundry
service.
It
was not until the 1970s that she decided to break her silence, after
witnessing the German police shield right-wing extremists against
protesters. “The next day, I joined the Association of the Persecutees
of the Nazi Regime,” she said. There, other members encouraged her to
tell her story, and to return to music.
SHE
spoke at schools. She joined two bands, singing Jewish resistance and
antiwar songs with her children. She delivered protest speeches at
neo-Nazi marches. A recurring nightmare of being trampled by Nazi
soldiers’ boots finally ceased. “I freed myself, inwardly,” she said.
Rap
is still not her favorite genre, but Ms. Bejarano likes her bandmates’
lyrics and is glad for the chance to reach a younger audience. Last
year, for example, she spoke out against the tragedy near Lampedusa, an
island off the coast of Italy where hundreds of African migrants fleeing war and poverty drowned en route to Europe.“You
have to help people like this,” she said. “I know it from my sister
Ruth. She made it to Switzerland, but the border guards turned her back.
The Germans shot her.”
The
plight of modern-day refugees is just one of many problems that keeps
Ms. Bejarano singing — in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, English, French and
Romany, the language of the Roma, or Gypsies. “I use music to act
against fascism,” she said. “Music is everything for me.”
Christa
Spannbauer, a filmmaker and journalist, said that the musicians’ work
makes it easier for young people to engage with the past constructively.
“If you just see the documentaries, you lose hope,” said Ms.
Spannbauer, whose own father was in the Waffen-SS as a teenager. “But
when you see the courage of the people who survived, it gives you hope
in humanity and strength to act. The kids see her and say, ‘O.K., we
want to do something.’ ”
Last
year, Ms. Bejarano added the Order of Merit, one of Germany’s most
important medals, to the many honors she has received. Soon, she and the
band will head to Istanbul. “I am always on the road,” she said,
shaking her head.
For
Mr. Yurtseven of the Microphone Mafia, every concert with Ms. Bejarano
is an inspiration. “Sometimes I’m kind of tired,” he said. “Then I look
at Esther, and think, ‘O.K., don’t tell yourself you’re tired. She’s 89
and still fighting for a better world.’ ”
"VERGESSEN kann man nie," so, Esther Bejarano im Interview.
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