Janet Horvath recalled the moment her life modified.
She was chatting along with her 87-year-old father about conductors he had worked with as she drove him to a physician’s appointment on a snowy day in Toronto in 2009. Each looked back on distinguished careers as cellists. George Horvath had been a member of the Budapest Symphony and the Toronto Symphony, and Janet was at the moment in her twenty ninth 12 months as associate principal cello with the Minnesota Orchestra.
When she asked whether he had ever worked with Leonard Bernstein, George shifted in his seat and placed the palm of his hand on his cheek. Several moments passed. A whoosh of air escaped from his lungs.
“Yes,” he said, as if gripped by memory. “It was a extremely popular day. He got here. To conduct Jewish orchestra in DP [displaced persons] camps. In 1948. After war. He played George Gershwin ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’ He was only a kid and was fan-tas-tic! I talked to him in German. I said, ‘I need to come back to America.’ So warm Bernstein was. He said, ‘I’m great Jewish musician. I should go to Palestine.” George’s face glowed as he spoke.
Janet was startled. She had never heard this story before. Her father, a defiantly taciturn man given to outbursts of anger and sobbing that usually exploded behind closed doors late at night, had just revealed a long-held secret, one among those memories about which she and her brother Rob had learned it was forbidden to ask.
Though George died in November of that 12 months (of heart failure) – Janet’s mother Katherine, a pianist and singer, had died in 2008 – Janet spent much of the following decade eagerly and sometimes apprehensively filling within the blanks in her parents’ history, discovering how, as Hungarian Jews, they and a number of other other relatives had managed to survive the Holocaust, George being forced into slave labor within the copper mines of Yugoslavia, while Katherine, in exchange for food, was salvaging pieces of wood and wire on the streets of Budapest, and at last, how, in post-War years, the 2 of them migrated to Canada – penniless – with just just a few small bags and George’s ever-present cello.
The result, the summation of 10 years of persistent and sometimes painful research, is Janet’s eloquent memoir, to be published this week, “The Cello Still Sings,” subtitled “A Generational Story of the Holocaust and the Transformative Power of Music.” The book is the story of three generations of Horvaths, intertwined tales of courage and devotion including a recounting of Janet’s own life and profession starting along with her earliest childhood memory, lying on the ground next to her father of their house in Toronto as he practiced the cello. In a fitting climax, the book concludes along with her performance as soloist in 2018 on the Landsburg Town Hall in Bavaria in a concert that duplicated this system that Bernstein had conducted there with George Horvath as cellist exactly 70 years earlier.
Early within the book Janet recalls hearing her father’s breakdowns in his room, his sobbing, late at night. She asks him the following day, “What were you sad about, Papa?” “Lesson to me,” he says in his thick Hungarian accent. “Lesson now. Not your corporation. Nothing happened, never.”
“He was affected by PTSD, but we didn‘t know that back then,” Janet said in a recent interview. “As a toddler, I assumed this was my fault. But we weren’t allowed to ask questions, and that is typical of my generation of youngsters of Holocaust survivors. We tried to guard them by never causing them any more pain and attempting to be the best-behaved children, not even letting them know if we had fallen and scraped our knees; they usually, in turn, closed themselves down about their previous lives because they desired to protect us. They were over-protective.
“Much later, I met a violinist whose parents were also Holocaust survivors. He said he was never allowed to have sleepovers. I said, ‘Oh, really? Nor was I.’ The thing was, for those who slept away from your loved ones, they may never see you again. They still had that fear. And before I used to be married, my father took my being a single woman much harder than any normal parent would. The worst fate for him was being alone, separated from family.”
Back in Toronto in 2009, after George divulged his recollection of the concert with Bernstein, Janet sought out any information she could find about her parents’ early lives. First, she checked out the Bernstein website, which corroborated her father’s story. On May 10, 1948, Bernstein had, the truth is, conducted on the Landsberg and Feldafing displaced individuals (DP) camps in Bavaria, Germany, in what was then the American zone, for 1000’s of Holocaust survivors, spectators and American military personnel.
Bernstein described the experience in a letter he wrote to a friend the following day. “Almost more exciting were the 2 concert events in DP camps. I used to be received by parades of children with flowers and the best of honors. I conducted a 20-piece concentration-camp orchestra and cried my heart out. It’s all amazing and horrible and delightful and ugly and messy and galvanizing.”
Working deep into the night, Janet found a newspaper clipping saying that Bernstein had donated and autographed the printed program of the concert events to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Recent York City. She emailed the museum, identifying herself because the daughter of one among the participants within the concert events and asked if she could see the signed program. The response from the museum the following day was “Yes,” you may make an appointment to see this system, and we even have photographs of the event.
“Howie,” she shrieked to her husband, Howard Kleyman, a retired lawyer. “They’ve photographs!”
Because it happened, the Minnesota Orchestra was scheduled to play a concert at Carnegie Hall just just a few months later, in May, and so Janet made an appointment to go to the museum on that day. With only a two-hour window before the rehearsal that morning at Carnegie Hall, she cabbed right down to the Battery in lower Manhattan and arrived on the museum just because the custodian was unlocking the important doors for the day. The top archivist escorted her to the museum’s important office and shortly returned with a shoebox-sized container. Wearing white calf-skin gloves, she gently opened the lid and lifted 4 tiny, 60-year-old black-and-white photos out of the box, each encased in a protective sleeve, and laid them in front of Janet.
“That’s him! That’s my father!” She squealed. There was little doubt in her mind that this debonair figure with a mustache and a full head of hair standing next to Bernstein and the opposite musicians was George Horvath. She got copies of the photos and hoped that showing them to her father might jog his memory. She had the photos enlarged and showed them to her father during her next trip to Toronto. George stared on the photos for several minutes, then identified several of the musicians: Stupel the Polish concertmaster, Chaim Arbeitman, the 18-year-old violinist.
“On a regular basis we sat together on bus,” he said. “We played two concert events together every week, sometimes more. For survivors, for American soldiers, for people in sanitariums. Jewish orchestra saved us after we left Hungary.”
Soon she learned a couple of documentary that had been made in regards to the orchestra titled “Creating Harmony: The Displaced Individuals’ Orchestra from St. Ottilien.” Produced by John J. Michalczyk and Ronald A. Marsh, the film was premiered in 2007 on the Jewish Heritage Museum. The documentary mixes archival footage, each film and still photos, with present-day interviews. Janet ordered a duplicate on DVD and returned to Toronto in July to point out it to her father.
“Are you ready, Papa?” she said, having loaded the DVD player. Father and daughter sat close together, holding hands and braced themselves. A lone, melancholy violin plays the famous “Meditation” from the opera “Thais” because the camera spans the barbed wire surrounding Auschwitz after which pans over a bunch of musicians huddled together on a bus, then zeroing in on a young George Horvath.
“There. There I’m again,” George said. “Look! I had a lot hair then. And there’s conductor Hofmekler.” Janet took notes as fast as she could. She didn’t wish to lose these memories.
The camera pans over the massive crowd gathered for a concert on an open field, a mixture of military personnel and concentration-camp survivors, “a wan and cadaverous group,” as Janet describes the scene, “men, women and youngsters with shaved heads and sickly hole cheeks and grainy faces. Among the survivors had been carried in on stretchers. Others, swaddled in blankets, stood shoulder to shoulder. They wept and grieved because the music transported them.”
The orchestra was initially named for St. Ottilien, a Benedictine abbey near Munich that had served through the war as a hospital for German soldiers. After the war, the Americans moved the Jews in and the Germans out. St. Ottilien became an understaffed haven for gravely sick, emaciated survivors of the Holocaust. A handful of musicians ended up there, and that group became the core of the Displaced Individuals’ Orchestra of St. Ottilien – eventually the Survivors’ Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra – which played its first concert events in May of 1945, lots of the musicians still clothed within the tattered, striped pajamas of camp prisoners. The performances were eventually sponsored by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
Though Germany didn’t invade its former ally Hungary until late within the war, Jewish life in Hungary in March 1944 was already severely restricted. George had hoped to grow to be an engineer, but by the point he was of age, Jews were barred from attending the University in Budapest, so he took up his second love – though perhaps his first – the cello and enrolled on the Franz Liszt Academy, where his future wife, Katolina Horvat, was studying voice and piano.
In 1939, the federal government imposed forced labor for Jewish men 21 to 48. By 1944, Jews weren’t allowed to take a seat on park benches or use public transportation. On May 26, 1944, George and Katherine were married. The following day George was placed on a train with a whole bunch of other Hungarian Jews and sent off to Bor, Yugoslavia, the choice to being shipped to Auschwitz. It was a two-day trip without food or water. The cars were nailed shut.
Within the copper mines in Bor, he worked with a crew constructing the railroad between Bor and Belgrade, breaking up boulders with a pickaxe and loading wheel burrows with dirt, sharing a loaf of moldy bread for dinner with five other men. Once they were liberated by Serbian partisans in September, George’s clothes were in shreds, and he weighed 115 kilos. A Russian soldier stole his boot.
On one among the lists of survivors put up on partitions, he saw his name: “Horvat Gyuri: we’re alive on the Swedish protected house in Pest.” When Budapest was liberated in February, 1945, he was reunited together with his mother and his wife. They slept on the dining room table. Nandor, Katherine’s father, showed up a few months later from the Buchenwald concentration camp. He had smuggled a small square of sugar into the camp. Every day, despite being famished, he ate a tiny square of the sugar, which saved him from starvation. Seriously sick, he could barely walk, but after three months of medical treatment, he was in a position to arise and make his way home. Katherine’s brother Tibi escaped from one among the camps. Pursued by dogs and dodging bullets, he made it back to Budapest.
In the ultimate tally, only 30 percent of Hungarian Jews survived the Holocaust.
The goal then for this war-weary, exhausted band of survivors was escape – escape from Europe. George, Katherine, Tibi and his wife Edit pooled their money to get to Munich, where they might obtain exit visas. They bribed a Russian truck driver and hid under heaps of straw behind the truck – the 4 of them plus George’s cello – trying to not cough or sneeze as they crossed the various checkpoints approaching the Austrian border.
When the truck made a sudden stop within the countryside on the outskirts of Vienna, they were fearful. Perhaps the driving force desired to steal their few possessions. “Quickly,” whispered Tibi, “throw every thing off the truck and jump!” They jumped. Tibi, an excellent swimmer, dove into the Danube, planning to hunt assist in Vienna. The others, less at home in large bodies of water, walked to Vienna that night. As had been planned, George’s twin sister Magda, who worked for the American army in Munich as a translator, met them in Vienna and took them to the consulate and got them a Jewish pass to Salzburg. They took a truck to Munich, where they stayed briefly in a DP camp, Windsheim, then moved into an apartment. Soon after they arrived, Magda took George to fulfill the members of a Jewish orchestra of Holocaust survivors that she had heard about, and it happened they needed a cellist. Membership of the orchestra fluctuated in numbers – sometimes as little as 15 – because many were anxiously awaiting exit visas and expected to sail away at any moment.
The Horvaths waited two years for his or her exit papers. George continued cello lessons, practicing six hours a day. Their kindly landlord loaned George money to purchase an excellent cello, an exquisite 18th-century Italian instrument, which Janet played as a teen for her first recital within the Art Gallery of Toronto.
By late 1947, Magda had made her approach to Chicago, having married a relative in that city, and he or she soon found Hungarians in Canada who would sponsor George and Katherine. (U.S. doors were closed to Holocaust survivors.) George signed as a farmer. Canada needed farmers. George recalled, “The inspector said to me, ‘These hands have never worked on a farm,’ and I said to him, ‘But I can learn.’ They gave us white bread on the train. I assumed it was cake.”
Settling right into a furnished flat ($4 per week) with no heat within the small farm town of Hamilton, Ontario, they did what they’d to do: washing cars, cleansing office buildings, scraping paint, scrubbing floors. And their English was poor. They were discouraged.
Finally, Katherine, an authority seamstress, secured a higher-paying job as a fur finisher within the sweatshops of Toronto, which allowed them to maneuver to that city. Then a friend told George of auditions for a cello position with the Toronto Symphony that will happen the very next morning. Refugees weren’t welcome, but George showed up anyway. He played all morning for the conductor, who liked what he heard and offered George a contract for the 1950-51 season. It was only a 24-week season, so, to make more money, George accepted every engagement he could get – commercials, weddings, picnics. And once his fame grew, an area synagogue invited him to play Bruch’s “Kol Nidrei” on Yom Kipper, which he was to repeat for a few years.
Surrounded by his family, George Horvath died on Thanksgiving night, 2009. Janet had hoped to interview him on film and had made arrangements with a crew sensitive to recording a Holocaust survivor, and George had agreed to it. But it surely was to not be. At his bedside on that November night, she hummed a favourite cello melody and ready to let him go.
In the following months, as she gathered and arranged her notes and thoughts on her parents’ lives, Janet realized that this may very well be the fabric for a book. She was already an experienced author. Her book “Playing (Less) Hurt – An Injury Prevention Guide for Musicians,” published in 2002, is taken into account a necessary text in what has been called the Music Medicine movement, which treats the medical problems of performers.
But a book about her parents as Holocaust survivors was an even bigger project, she thought, and more personal. “Many sections brought back painful memories, things that also make me cry, things that, as a toddler, I didn’t understand. Also, I felt this must reinvent myself,” she said.
Reinvention seemed an appropriate word because, after 30 years with the Minnesota Orchestra, where she had been a distinguished figure, Janet resigned because she was affected by a rare condition in her left ear that turned out to be hyperacusis, wherein most sounds grow to be painful. She finally received treatment – and what is nearly a cure – on the Oregon Health and Sciences University in Portland, Ore., where she was placed on a de-sensitization technique to teach her brain to simply accept sound again.
Eager about the book and how you can organize it, she took classes on the Loft in Minneapolis and eventually applied for and was accepted into the MFA program at Hamline University in 2012 with the book her thesis. She accomplished the degree in creative writing in 2017.
A 12 months later Janet closed the circle. The local council of Landsberg, the German town that was the location of one among the biggest DP camps after the war, hosting 1000’s of refugees in often desperate conditions, decided to arrange a concert that will commemorate this system that a young Leonard Bernstein presided over on the local DP camp in 1948, leading an orchestra of Holocaust survivors. Janet was invited to perform as soloist with the Landsberg School orchestra, playing at the identical place her father had played with Bernstein 70 years before. The concert also acknowledged the 100th anniversary of Bernstein’s birth.
Appropriately, the piece she played that day in Germany was “Kol Nidrei.” Her words to the audience were translated into German. “I described the importance of this piece to the Jewish people and particularly to my family. I told them my father played ‘Kol Nidrei’ yearly in our synagogue for 30 years, and I‘ve continued that tradition one other 30 years, and to today, ‘Kol Nidrei’ represents our obligation to make an apology and inspires our resolve to guide higher lives of teshuva, tefillah and tzedakah, which is empathy, compassion and justice.”
She recalled the ultimate moments of the performance on that day. “Fading away in tranquility, the concluding high A drifted upward, morendo. A mist of tears onstage and a lingering sigh from the audience restored us to this earthly plane. My entire body quivered as I slowly rose to my feet. I acknowledged the extraordinary playing of the young musicians and the enthusiastic applause, a testament to the unifying sentiments we experienced. Together we had ascended through the tenth dimension of infinite possibilities.”
Events:
Janet Horvath will take part in a book signing and conversation with Minnesota poet Deborah Keenan at 7 p.m. Tuesday on the University Club of St. Paul, 420 Summit Ave., St. Paul.
Book signing and reading: 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 2, at COMMA bookshop, 4250 Upton Ave. S., Minneapolis.
Book signing: Excelsior Bay Books, 7 p.m. on April 4, 37 Water St., Excelsior, Minnesota.