There is no closing our eyes to the horrors of the Holocaust, even after all this time.
Renée Jolles recalls stories her father, Jerome Jolles, told of his life as a 14-year-old boy growing up in Romania. It was in the midst of World War II. The country was aligned with Nazi Germany, and Allied bombers were hitting the capital city of Bucharest, where Jerome and his family lived. He told his daughter stories of helping shovel up the bodies and burying them.
Renée Jolles says her father, as a Jew, and his family could have been arrested at any time. But the Nazi occupation was disorganized, perhaps disinterested, and very agreeable to bribes. Besides, her grandfather owned the button factory in Bucharest. The Nazis confiscated the factory but kept him on to run it because they needed buttons for their uniforms.
That’s the part of Jerome Jolles’ family that survived. But much of the rest of the family, who lived in the countryside, were not as fortunate.
“The Nazis went into the country and rounded up everybody,” Renée Jolles says. “And almost everybody was exterminated at that time, and he lost everyone. Absolutely everyone.”
Either side the Jews of Bucharest took presented a murderous proposition. Death from above, in the form of Allied bombers. And death at ground level, where German troops hunted Jews.
When the war ended, Jerome Jolles emigrated to Prague and then to New York City, where he studied piano, composition and accordion at The Juilliard School.
He died in 2014, but the family’s music lives on through his daughter. As a violinist, Renée Jolles’ résumé shimmers with solo and ensemble performances throughout the world, on premieres of new pieces and through radio broadcasts of live performances.
The same year her father passed away, Jolles – who had come to the Eastman School of Music as professor of violin – introduced the first of the yearly Holocaust Remembrance Concerts. They are in observance of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. “A Time to Remember” is a free performance at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, April 16, in Kilbourn Hall.
“What we try to do is find lost and forgotten voices from that time period,” Jolles says. “Mostly people who were murdered in the camps, who probably would have had really big careers if they hadn’t been – or who had very big careers, especially in Europe – who were just murdered.”
“A Time to Remember” is the music of the murdered and the displaced; people forced to flee their homes for another land. Some of the five pieces, accompanied by readings from Eastman students, were composed in the 1930s and ’40s as Nazism led to the persecution of Jews in Europe. Numbers so big, they can’t even be properly counted to this day. Six to nine million Jews dead, and three million other people as well.
Sunday’s remembrance is music and poetry, both contemporaneous to the time and looking back from our perspective today. Art that frames two decades of virtual silence on that history. A silence that has an explanation.
Some of the music and words are modern reflections on a stunningly horrific time, such as “Sorrow Springs are the Same.” Composed in 2022 by Victoria Bond, it was first performed in January 2023 by Jolles at the United Nations’ International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On Sunday at Kilbourn, Bond will read the poetry that inspired the work and Jolles will play solo violin.
This history is complex. When she arrived to teach at Eastman in 2014, Jolles says, she was expected to be a part of the traditional welcoming convocation at the beginning of every academic year. She would be introduced and play a piece of music.
“I looked at the date,” she says, “and I went, ‘Oh that’s the first day of Rosh Hashanah,’ which is the Jewish New Year, a very important holiday.”
Jolles pointed out that Christians take time off for the Christmas holiday, “and it’s no accident that’s when winter break is.” So she declined to be a part of the convocation in favor of spending the time in synagogue with her family.
“It just seemed insensitive to me to put it on a day when some faculty and students wouldn’t be able to be there,” she says. “I thought it was important to take a stand on that issue immediately.”
There was no argument from the school.
“No one thought badly of me for taking it off, and there were no repercussions,” Jolles says. “I felt extremely welcomed and supported in this school.”
She still feels that.
“It’s a wonderful place to work, I love it here. But there are these vestiges of the way things used to be.”
And those vestiges? Eastman founder Howard Hanson.
“When I first came to Eastman, I was looking for something to give back to the community,” Jolles says. “Eastman has changed a lot, even since I got here. It is a school that draws a lot from the Midwest and definitely has drawn, historically, a certain kind of a student body.”
This does not seem evident today, she concedes.
“Great steps have been made to welcome everybody, and to be inclusive and diversify the student body, which is gratifying to see,” Jolles says. “There’s still some work to be done, of course, but there was definitely that feeling in the school…”
A feeling that is well documented.
“Hanson was an antisemite, yes,” says Jolles.
Her Holocaust Remembrance Concert is an opportunity to reflect on history eight decades past, including two decades of silence that runs from the 1940s and on into the ’60s. It’s the silence of the many Jewish composers who died in the Holocaust, who might have otherwise been creating.
“The amazing thing about the music they wrote, even while in the camps, is that most of it was not reflective of their situation,” Jolles says. “If it had been, and the Germans found it, it would have been confiscated and they would have probably been shot.”
“But also, I don’t think that was their intent. I think their intent was to continue to create art and to continue to feed their souls, and the souls of the people around them.”
Authorities fear the truth of music. Jolles tells the story of what the prisoners were up to at Terezin, a concentration camp in the Czech Republic.
“The conditions were deplorable, but they were able to have some artistic life at the same time,” Jolles says of Terezin (sometimes written as Theresienstadt). “Many compositions were written on toilet paper, because they weren’t allowed paper. Or they would write in between the lines of a discarded newspaper they found. And they put on concerts, but they were sort of late at night in the barracks.”
Terezin was also a showcase camp for the Red Cross. Before inspections, the Germans would clean up the prisoners, dress them in decent clothes, and even sit them in cafés. When the Red Cross left, the fake town was immediately taken down, the clothing taken away. “The whole thing was a sham,” Jolles says.
Led by Viktor Ullmann, brought to Terezin after a long career as a composer, the prisoners quietly created an opera called “The Emperor of Atlantis,” the story of a tyrannical leader.
“I think eventually the Nazis all figured out it was an allegory about them,” Jolles says, “and they put a stop to it.”
But Ullman was not forever silenced. His music will be featured in a section on Sunday called “Songs by Viktor Ullmann.” There will also be music by Rosy Wertheim, a Dutch social worker and composer who, trapped in Amsterdam after the German invasion, hid fellow Jews in her basement. And yes, the story does share some parallels with that of Anne Frank.
“And then I realized, most of these people were killed, right? Or their careers were ended, and they lost the trajectory that they were on. And so we forget about them,” Jolles says. “And when you realize there was this huge, rich, wonderful pool of artists at that time, everything starts to make sense. And you start to look at this music and see how music history might have changed, or gone on differently.”
Yes, we lost so much music, from the 1940s and on into the ’60s. Estimates of the deaths directly resulting from World War II range from 35 million to 60 million, and counting bodies in wartime is an inexact science.
“The loss of human potential – never mind the arts, just anything – is staggering,” Jolles says. “We lost doctors and scientists, artists and musicians. Shoemakers to grocers, it affected absolutely everyone.”
Jeff Spevak is an arts writer.