Born in southwestern Germany in 1924, Esther Loewy was the daughter of a cantor and piano teacher. She was sixteen when she was taken to a slave-labor camp, from which she was sent to Auschwitz, where, despite never having played an accordion previously, she was recruited to play one in the camp’s women’s orchestra. After liberation, she moved to British Palestine, where she married Nissim Bejarano. Esther died on July 15. Richard Sandomir tells her story:
Orchestras were formed in many concentration camps—to entertain the Nazis, but also to serve other purposes. “They were for the benefit of the administration and staff,” said Bret Werb, the musicologist and recorded-sound curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “They believed that quick march music would get the prisoners to march in time, and quickly, to hard labor.”
Mrs. Bejarano, who arrived at Auschwitz in April 1943, performed at the camp for several months until being moved later that year to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany. On a death march from the camp near the end of the war, she and several other prisoners escaped.
[After the war], she found it difficult to discuss the Holocaust with anyone until the 1970s, when she watched German police-officers shield right-wing extremists against protesters. The incident turned her into an activist. . . . She began to tell her story in schools, delivered protest speeches and sang with Coincidence, the band that she formed with her children in 1989.
Around 2009, when she was in her eighties, Mrs. Bejarano’s musical career took an unexpected turn. She was asked to join Microphone Mafia, a German hip-hop group, with whom she continued to spread her message against fascism and intolerance to young audiences in Germany and abroad, from Istanbul to Vancouver. . . . Hip-hop was not her preferred musical genre. She joked that she persuaded her bandmates to lower their volume and stop jumping around onstage so much. She believed, [however], that hip-hop’s influence on young people could help her counter a rise in intolerance.
Read more on New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/arts/music/esther-bejarano-dead.html