78 The Economist July 17th 2021
Obituary Esther Bejarano
ThethoughtofanorchestrainAuschwitzchillstheblood.The
idea that at the end of those railway tracks, through those high
iron gates, amid the pall and ash from the everburning crematori
ums, light music was playing, is an obscenity. But Auschwitz had
several orchestras, playing or rehearsing for up to ten hours a day.
And for 18yearold Esther Loewy, as she then was, the justformed
Girls’ Orchestra was a piece of luck. If she could get into it she
would not be hauling rocks all day, which might kill her. She
would be given more food. So before her audition she sat in a cor
ner of her barracks, a tiny, drab figure with her chafed hands and
shaved head, practising.
The piece she had been set was easy, the hit song from the film
“Bel Ami”, which was also all about luck. “You have luck with the
women, Bel Ami!” it ran: Du hast Glück bei den Frau’n, Bel Ami!
Everyone knew that jaunty tune. What she did not know was how
to play the heavy accordion that rested on her knees. She had lied
that she did, just to get in. As a pianist she could work out the
righthand keys, but all those lefthand buttons foxed her. What
did they mean? This was urgent; without music, she was finished.
Then she chanced on a chord of C major, like an old friend, and all
was well. Her luck was in.
It was hardly a rest cure. Her morning task now was to stand in
all weathers at the camp gate, playing German marching songs as
the prisoners went off to forced labour and, in the evening,
trudged back. The same old tunes, over and over. In the evenings
there were classical concerts, tailored to the few instruments they
had and whatever sheet music they could get. That was more her
kind of thing, like the Bach, Mozart and Schubert she sang on re
quest for the barrack leaders: the music of her childhood in Saar
brücken, where their house rang with family recitals and the rich
operatic voice of her father, a cantor in the synagogue. But that was
in another world. In this one she played with a rifle aimed at herback; the power of music was used as a lure and a lie, a promise of
comfort where there was none. The worst was when they per
formed at the railway station as the fetid cattle cars arrived. The
dazed new arrivals would smile and wave, with no idea what was
waiting for them. She would cry, then, as she played.
Yet even through such scenes, luck glinted sometimes. When
she caught typhoid, her role as the only accordionist got her prop
er care. After less than a year in Auschwitz her status as mischling,
mixedrace, with a Christian grandmother, saw her moved to Rav
ensbrück, a women’s camp that was slightly less harsh. When, in
1945, the prisoners were marched west to escape Soviet forces, she
and six other girls ran away into the forest. There they fell in with
American troops; safe now, she slowly made her way to France
and, eventually, Palestine. She had survived.
The war was over. Her own fight, though, was just beginning,
against racism and antiSemitism everywhere. The young Esther,
singing and playing timorously in Auschwitz, might have been as
tonished to see herself seven decades later in a pixie haircut and
long scarf, dancing on a stage with rappers. But so she did, this
time making music vigorous and defiant enough to avenge those
hopeless faces at the railway station, and all who had died.
The postwar world had severely disappointed her. She settled
and married in the new state of Israel, where she found success as
a singer, but Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians made her wild
with anger. It struck her as racism pure and simple, a forced dis
placement and oppression of people as unjust as the persecution
of Europe’s Jews. She attacked those policies all her life long, so fu
riously that she was later called an antiSemite herself, and evi
dently Israel was not the place to stay.
She took the family to Germany. It was home, though full of aw
ful memories. The day when, at 14, she had been kicked out of
school; the time Hitler had visited Saarbrücken, with the crowds
eerily saluting him; the beating of her sister Ruth on Kristallnacht
in 1938, until she could hardly stand; Ruth’s killing, and her par
ents’ murder. She could hope, at least, that after Germany’s defeat
Nazism would disappear. When the Americans had rescued her,
she had played the accordion while Hitler’s portrait blazed fiercely
in a fire. Surely his vile ideas were now as dead as he was.
They were still around, however. They lurked like bad seeds
underground, or like her recurring nightmare of Nazi boots tram
pling her—just as, on the forced march from Ravensbrück, the sol
diers had shot and stamped over the bodies of those too weak to go
on. In 1986, at 61, she got into an argument with members of the
fascist npdand their police protectors, right outside her boutique
in Hamburg. When both groups insulted her, it was time to write
her memoirs of the camps and to cofound the Auschwitz Com
mittee, which helped survivors tell their stories. It was time, too,
to unleash her music against what she called the Great Silence.
Her father had collected Yiddish songs. Now she formed a
band, called Coincidence, with her children Joram and Edna, to
sing more recent melodies from the Jewish resistance. Her favour
ite was “Mir Lebn Eybik”, “We’ll live for ever”, a song from the Vil
nius ghetto: “We’ll live for ever,/though worlds burn down,/We’ll
live for ever,/no cash around.../We will live on and on and on.../
We’ll live for ever,/We are here!”
That certainly seemed true of her, as she toured tirelessly
round Germany. Every week she was in a different city, especially
in schools, telling the children what had happened to the Jews,
alerting them to racism in all its forms. To modernise the message
she embraced the hiphop of Microphone Mafia, two towering
young men, one a Turkish immigrant, who rapped on the resis
tance songs (a bit loudly, she thought), while she, the tiny, lucky
survivor with fists clenched, kept the old words flowing.
She also sang “Bel Ami”. Usually it was a defiant, happy song
without an accordion, which she did not play onstage. If anyone
else played accordion for her, it became harder to sing, as though
her voice waded through tears. nSongs against hateEsther Bejarano, member of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra
and anti-racism campaigner, died on July 10th, aged 96