Violins of Hope

CULTURE

Violins of Hope: Strings of the Holocaust

by Keith Parnell

JACKSONVILLE, FL- Music can often be a binding multicultural glue that links communities otherwise not connected. Shamefully, I admit that I was brought to this concert by my love of the violin rather than my inept knowledge of the Holocaust. Like so many of the darkest of times in humanity, the Holocaust is so often glazed over in our history books and culture as an almost supernatural culmination of events, ushered in by pre-humanitarians. As if on a pedestal, we look down on this event as an apologue of human depravity, with no risk of its reemergence in our future. Even as a grade school student I can recall recognizing it as more of a “check mark” in my teacher’s curriculum rather than the acknowledgement of a series of actual decisions and actions of individuals.

For me, it wasn’t until I was in high school that I met my first non-conformist teacher, after a student made an aloof comment calling into question the validity of the Holocaust. She made it her mission to put actual faces with names, stories with music, and to create an undeniable connection between my peers and the travesty of the Holocaust. It’s the efforts of people like this unforgettable history teacher and Violins of Hope founder Amnon Weinstein that help to avoid casting this metaphorical blanket over events such as the Holocaust and more recently the Rwandan events that flood the headlines even today.

The words of Frank Meeink, a former Neo-Nazi ring true, “…the first step in confronting hatred is to get people with different backgrounds to come together, to learn something about each other.” His story is on one of many featured in Confronting Hatred: 70 Years after the Holocaust, a Morgan Freeman guided series of narratives that greatly complements the sentiments of Amnon Weinstein Violins of Hope. This international series of concerts was started by Weinstein, an Israeli violin maker, after being approached to restore a violin once played by men interred in the World War II concentration camps. Being a fate narrowly avoided by his father’s actions to flee Europe in 1938, Weinstein felt a connection to this violin and others like it.

Since 1996 he has been working to track down, restore and breathe life back into these vessels so they can once again tell their stories. Violins of Hope now features over thirty restored violins that survived the Holocaust, even when their owners did not. These violins are brought to life through the words of those held captive in concentration camps and the melodies once played by their owners in the darkest of times. Each string plays to the surviving hope of humanity. Hope, surpassing death itself, gives power to the voices that continue to speak out against injustice and a voice to those that would otherwise remain silent.

“When the Nazis came for the communists,

I remained silent;

I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,

I remained silent;

I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,

I did not speak out;

I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,

I remained silent;

I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,

there was no one left to speak out.”

~ Martin Niemöller