In her first month as a prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp, 19-year-old Esther Loewy was forced to do hard labour in a quarry. It nearly killed her. She then heard about a women’s orchestra that Maria Mandl, the SS-Helferin [helper] in charge of female prisoners, had recently started, essentially as a propaganda tool for visitors and camp newsreels. Every Sunday they would perform a concert for SS officers.
Those chosen to play in the orchestra were given extra food as well as their own bed. They were also excused hard labour. As this looked like her only chance of survival, Loewy approached the prisoner who was leading the women’s orchestra of Auschwitz and told her that she was a pianist. There was no piano in the camp she was told, but there was an accordion. Loewy lied that she could play one. For her audition she was asked to play Bel Ami, a popular German song.
“I didn’t have any problems with my right hand, because I knew how to play the piano and I immediately found the keyboard, but the bass is on the left, and only thanks to the fact that I have a good ear could I find the right tones,” she recalled.
The orchestra played upbeat music as prisoners left the camp to work and when trains full of Jews arrived.
“You knew that the new arrivals were going to be gassed and all you could do was stand there and play . . . We played with tears in our eyes,” Esther Bejarano, as Loewy later became, recalled. “The new arrivals came in waving and applauding us, but we knew they would be taken directly to the gas chambers.”
Advertisement
After six months in Auschwitz, she was transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Then, in the spring of 1945, she escaped from a death march along with several other prisoners. A few weeks later she was rescued by American troops and celebrated the Allied victory in a market square in Lübz, Germany. An American GI handed her an accordion, which she played as American soldiers, Soviet troops and camp survivors danced around a burning portrait of Hitler.
Esther Loewy was born in Saarlouis, a town in French-controlled Germany, in 1924, one of five children to Rudolf, a teacher, and Margarethe. She grew up in a house that rang with music and the powerful operatic voice of her father, the head cantor of the town’s Jewish community, who encouraged her to learn to play the piano.
In 1935 the Saar territory was reunified with Germany after a referendum. Under Nazi rule, Esther would see her community reduced to second-class citizens. After Kristallnacht three years later, her parents sent her to a Zionist training camp so she could prepare to emigrate to Palestine. In 1941, however, the Nazis arrested all the teachers and students at the camp and sent them to a Nazi work camp near Berlin, from where the teenage Esther would be sent to Auschwitz.
She would later say: “One’s best years as a youth are those from ages 16 to 20. But what kind of a youth did we have? None, really. A horrible youth.”
After the end of the war, she arrived at a displaced persons camp, where she learnt that her parents had been shot dead near Riga, Latvia, and that one of her sisters, Ruth, had found shelter in Switzerland before being deported back to Germany and sent to Auschwitz, where she died in 1942.
Advertisement
In 1945 Loewy emigrated to what would become Israel in search of a new life, arriving with a group of Jewish refugees by boat from Marseilles.
Many survivors who had played in the camp never played an instrument again, but a life without music was not something that Loewy ever considered. She studied singing, joined an award-winning choir and taught children to play the recorder.
In 1950 she married Nissim Bejarano, a lorry driver whose family had emigrated from Bulgaria. The couple had two children, Edna and Joram, both of whom survive her. The family moved to Hamburg in 1960.
Bejarano, who still considered Germany her home, initially struggled to rejoin society, often looking at people older than she was and wondering if they had murdered her parents or sister.
She had found it difficult to discuss the Holocaust with anyone until the 1970s, but then began to tell her story in schools and deliver speeches at anti-racism marches. She was also involved in the International Auschwitz Committee, which was formed to give survivors a platform to share their stories.
Advertisement
She was later awarded the Carl von Ossietzky medal and Germany’s Order of Merit for her activism against what she called the “old and new Nazis”.
Using music to fight against racism, she set up a band with her two children to play Yiddish melodies and Jewish resistance songs.
In 2009 Bejarano, then in her mid-eighties, joined Microphone Mafia, a hip-hop group that used music to spread an anti-fascist and anti-racist message to the German youth. Initially she thought that hip-hop was too loud, but she believed that the genre’s influence could counter a rise in racism.
“It’s a clash of everything: age, culture, style. But we all love music and share a common goal: we’re fighting against discrimination,” she said.
Bejarano, a small, energetic woman who was not even 5ft tall, continued to perform with Microphone Mafia well into her nineties, playing almost 900 concerts around the world in her 12 years with the group.
Advertisement
Kutlu Yurtseven, a German-Turkish rapper in the group, said: “I once asked Esther how she can still make music after Auschwitz. And she said that if they had also taken away the music from her, she would have died.”
Esther Bejarano, Auschwitz survivor and musician, was born on December 15, 1924. She died on July 10, 2021, aged 96