--- title: Leonard Bernstein and the Orchestra of Holocaust Survivors description: On the centennial of Bernstein's birth, a look at the surprising story of how he conducted an orchestra of Holocaust survivors in 1948 canonical: https://time.com/5376731/leonard-bernstein-holocaust-survivors-concert/ author: Olivia B. Waxman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-08-24T17:11:04.000Z article:modified_time: 2023-12-12T17:59:57.000Z article:section: History og:title: Leonard Bernstein and the Orchestra of Holocaust Survivors og:description: Leonard Bernstein was born on Aug. 25, 1918 og:url: https://time.com/5376731/leonard-bernstein-holocaust-survivors-concert/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb823c1f3293af664/69893888bc6cfc4e5f3e6c66/leonard-bernstein-conducting-displaced-persons-holocaust-orchestra.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2405 og:image:height: 1353 og:image:alt: leonard-bernstein-conducting-displaced-persons-holocaust-orchestra og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Leonard Bernstein and the Orchestra of Holocaust Survivors twitter:description: Leonard Bernstein was born on Aug. 25, 1918 twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb823c1f3293af664/69893888bc6cfc4e5f3e6c66/leonard-bernstein-conducting-displaced-persons-holocaust-orchestra.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Surprising Story Behind This Picture of Leonard Bernstein Conducting an Orchestra of Holocaust Survivors > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: The Last Nazi Trials [Watch (HLS stream): The Last Nazi Trials](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/iBig1Tcg.m3u8) (7:02)  _Published 2016-05-03. The trial of a former Nazi guard brings forth questions about justice and forgiveness for Holocaust survivors and German citizens._  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Updated: Dec 12, 2023 5:59 PM UTCPublished: Aug 24, 2018 5:11 PM UTC  Leonard Bernstein conducting an orchestra of concentration camp survivors for a concert sponsored by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee on May 10, 1948, in Munich. Leonard Bernstein conducting an orchestra of concentration camp survivors for a concert sponsored by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee on May 10, 1948, in Munich. American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Updated: Dec 12, 2023 5:59 PM UTCPublished: Aug 24, 2018 5:11 PM UTC The year leading up to the centennial of Leonard Bernstein’s Aug. 25, 1918, birth has been an occasion for myriad reprisals of the composer and conductor’s most famous works, from [_West Side Story_](https://www.masslive.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2018/07/west%5Fside%5Fstory%5Fmagical%5Fpart%5Fo.html)to [_On the Waterfront,_ ](http://www.playbill.com/article/turner-classic-movies-celebrates-leonard-bernstein-with-3-days-of-programming-starting-july-20)for which he wrote the music. But the orchestra he conducts in the photo above is less well-known — though likewise important to his place in the history of 20th century music. The musicians facing Bernstein comprised a group that called itself the Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra. It included more than a dozen Holocaust survivors who are thought to have organized themselves into an orchestra while at the St. Ottilien abbey, which was serving as a displaced-persons camp. After the Holocaust, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) helped organize a series of cultural ambassadors to boost morale for displaced persons and survivors, whose lives remained upended even years after World War II came to an end. Bernstein, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants to the United States, was part of that cohort. He came to Germany in 1948 and, on May 10 of that year, outside Munich, served as the guest conductor for two concerts by that group, at the [Feldafing](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/feldafing-displaced-persons-camp) and [Landsberg ](https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/displaced-persons/camp4.htm)displaced-persons camps. Bernstein would describe the experience as a moving and exhilarating one — but the concerts almost didn’t happen at all.  Leonard Bernstein with the members of the Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra whom he conducted on May 10, 1948, outside Munich. Gift of Henny Durmashkin Gurko, Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, N.Y. When Leonard Bernstein — who didn’t fight in World War II because he had asthma — was invited to conduct the [Bavarian State Opera’s orchestra](https://www.nytimes.com/1948/05/11/archives/bernstein-scores-in-munich-concert-conducts-bavarian-orchestra-and.html) in Munich on May 9, 1948, he had something to prove. As TIME noted in a 1957 [cover](http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19570204,00.html) story on the conductor, as his career took off, he’d made a conscious decision not to hide his Jewish heritage, although those close to him thought it would hurt him. His mentor Serge Alexandrovich Koussevitzky, also Jewish, “begged Lennie to change his unglamorous name so that his way to success would not be blocked by anti-Semitism,” the magazine reported, and it quoted Bernstein as saying in response, “I’ll do it as Bernstein or not at all.” So he knew, when he went to Germany, that he was going with baggage. In a May 11 [letter](https://www.loc.gov/item/lbcorr.00567/) to his piano teacher-turned-personal secretary Helen Coates, he described the Munich concert with the Bavarian State Opera orchestra as a massive success for him and for the larger post-war project. “I had three obstacles to overcome—youth, Americanism & Jewishness,” he wrote. “It means so much…since music is the German’s last stand in their ‘master-race’ claim.” But, though the State Opera concert eventually went off without a hitch, getting it to happen was less than smooth. Accounts of what exactly happened vary (the account of United Nations aid worker [Theodore Feder](https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn504829) suggests there was a transit strike going on; Bernstein’s own papers [trace the problem](https://bernstein.classical.org/features/music-in-munich-1948-and-2018/) to a strike by the musicians themselves) but it was during the period of logistical maneuvering that the idea was hatched for the concerts with the Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration ended up helping to arrange transportation for the musicians, and then helped clue him in to the existence of the musicians among the nearby displaced persons. “\[The U.N.\] asked, “Well, can you do something for us?” as Ivy Weingram, curator of the _Leonard Bernstein: The Power of Music_exhibit at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, which has a display on the concert, paraphrases. “So the U.N., with the JDC, asked Bernstein if he’d take this side trip to Feldafing and Landsberg.”  Program for Sheerit Hapleitah (which has been called the "The Surviving Remnant" or the "Orchestra of Last Survivors") concert outside Munich, Germany, dated May 10, 1948. Gift of Henny Durmashkin Gurko, Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, N.Y. A letter in the JDC’s archives backs up the idea that the displaced persons camp concerts were planned last-minute. “Arrangements” were done the “eleventh hour” and “with fingers crossed,” according to a Jun. 3, 1948, [memo](http://search.archives.jdc.org/multimedia/Documents/Geneva45-54/G45-54%5FCount/G45-54%5FGR%5F022/G45-54%5FGR%5F022%5F0169.pdf) written by Charles Malamuth, head of publicity for the JDC in Europe, to the organizations’ headquarters office. In any case, it worked. Harry Bialor, 88, a Polish survivor who now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., says he was a conservatory student and saw Bernstein’s Feldafing concert, watching from the second or third row. “It was a hot day, the place was packed, and he took off his jacket and he said, ‘We’re all going to sweat together,’ in Yiddish,” he recalls. “We were shocked; we weren’t expecting that. It made me study my music harder after I met him. I really dug in.” Among the songs played during Bernstein’s visit were George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” works from Puccini’s _Tosca,_ Verdi’s _Rigoletto,_ Bizet’s _L’Arlésienne_ and Weber’s _Freischütz_. He did one concert at Feldafing in the afternoon and one at Landsberg in the evening, and then gave a bonus concert later that night, playing the run-down piano in the mess hall of Landsberg. The DP camp concerts were “almost more exciting” to him than the Munich concert was. “I was received by parades of kids with flowers, and the greatest honors,” Bernstein [wrote](https://bernstein.classical.org/features/music-in-munich-1948-and-2018/) to Coates. “I conducted… _Freischütz_ of all things and cried my heart out.”  Leonard Bernstein receives flowers from an admirer after conducting an orchestra of concentration camp survivors for a concert sponsored by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee on May 10, 1948, outside Munich. American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee The fact that Bernstein conducted both the State Opera musicians and the displaced persons was not uncontroversial. Only three years had passed since Germany surrendered in World War II on May 7, 1945, and Bernstein apparently came off as oblivious of the extent to which Jewish people would condemn any contact with Germans. “Apparently, he does not know the difference between a German orchestra and a Jewish DP orchestra politically,” Malamuth [wrote](http://search.archives.jdc.org/multimedia/Documents/Geneva45-54/G45-54%5FCount/G45-54%5FGR%5F022/G45-54%5FGR%5F022%5F0169.pdf), describing him as a “very nice” person, just “politically very naive and uninformed.” As current JDC archivist Linda Levi summed up the controversy to TIME, “Officials were afraid that if the Jews heard about this, they would be furious.” She says that the concert’s organizers deliberately didn’t mention the Bavarian State Opera concert the night before so that it wouldn’t color their enjoyment of the displaced persons camps’ orchestra. The JDC also had an incentive to make sure Bernstein had a good time with the musicians, because they were hoping that he would help the most talented ones immigrate to America. For instance, he helped concentration camp survivor [David Arben](https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1167263) get into the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia; Arben became a violinist with the Philadelphia Orchestra for more than 30 years. (Families of others who were there have put up video [testimonials](https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/sisters-remember-sisters-and-superstar-uncle-killed-in-holocaust/) online.) Bernstein appeared to receive one physical souvenir for his time with the displaced persons camp residents. He [told](https://bernstein.classical.org/features/music-in-munich-1948-and-2018/) his secretary to be on the lookout for “a package containing a real concentration camp costume which they gave to me,” warning her, “Be particularly careful of it—it’s a great possession.” In the abstract, what kind of effect the concert had on his future compositions is a matter of interpretation. But the fact that he left behind an unfinished opera inspired by the Holocaust, dubbed _Babel,_ which he was working on the year he died, is one clear sign of how that period affected him. He once described the central theme of his work as “the struggle that is born of the crisis of our century, a crisis of faith.” Bernstein’s concert for Holocaust restored faith in some of those who saw him. The concerts, recalls Bialor, “meant that somebody cares. Somebody important cares. Jewish life is flourishing, and you can’t hold it back.” **Correction: Aug. 27** _The original version of this story misstated the source of photographs in two photo captions. The pictures belonged to Henny Durmashkin Gurko, not Henry Durmashkin Gurko._ ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] Our family had tried so hard to stay together. My sister Edith was about 12 years old was sent in the direction that my mother went. The SS guard he motioned me to in the direction other young adults went. I didn't move. I leaned over peering into the crowd and trying to see if Edith had caught up. I was horrified that she would not find our mother. She would be lost to our family, alone amongst strangers. The trauma of this separation Lingers with me to this day. [ MUSIC ] [ SOUND ] [ CROSSTALK ] It's not a matter of Sending him to jail for the rest of his life. I don't feel that, that will help, but what's happening now will help. And today, I must do what I'm asked to do and not stop and cry because that is not what's required at the moment [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Okay look at me. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ LAUGH ] It's a teaching moment for the entire country of Europe to rethink and learn from it. [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] [ MUSIC ] The lawyers were searching for people Survivors. They asked, would I come, and do I know anything about this Nazi guard, and of course no. I was much too distracted to look into his face, but I was not required to have remembered the face, so I said yes. If I can help. I would come. So far over the last seven decades, prosecutors just focused on the murder of the people who arrived in Auschwitz on the lam and then were gassed right No prosecutor ever brought forward a charge, saying that a guard is also responsible for making it possible that the people who were prisoners in the camp were murdered systematically. And the indictment against Hanning is the first indictment that actually says Auschwitz was altogether A organized factory of mass murder. Not only the selection on the [ INAUDIBLE ] This is, I am here. Right here standing here. As I said in the testimony, I had just been separated from my younger sister, and as I was saying I didn't leave. I actually defied orders, I just stood there. How am I to leave her like this? People tell me, you know she died, you know everybody died, and it's been a long time. And it doesn't help. [ MUSIC ] This is Council Aide and Justice Says it's too little, and is a enormous failure, it's a system in the end does the right thing, it's better than not going. I think the main purpose of this trials is to give justice to our clients, it's for them. I just want him to Hear from me and others who testified, what the consequences were of what he did at a young age. But he keeps his eyes down, head down. I don't know whether he doesn't want to face the survivors. What his motivation is. I really don't know. [ FOREIGN ] And the further you go down in the chain of command, the more the question arises of how far legal responsibility goes. And if none of the witnesses know the defendant, this, in the view of the defense, is a testament to how unremarkable the defendant possibly was. [ MUSIC ] I'm not interested in the personality of the defendant. For me he's a broken, failed person. What is he supposed to do? He's defending himself? That's ridiculous. What is he supposed to do? He's defending himself? That's ridiculous. If he was a warden in Auschwitz, I already judge him. I can't judge that. Forgiveness? Maybe he just... How many people followed? How many people killed? Maybe they didn't have a choice but to act in that way? [ MUSIC ] There's a lot of talk of forgiveness, I'm very surprised about it. Everybody had to do their part or it wouldn't have worked efficiently. How does mass murder get forgiven? [ MUSIC ] The crime is so enormous, it's not a forgivable crime, it's a crime to be analyzed and learned from. 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