(ANSA) - BERLIN, 10 JUL - The accordion had allowed her to survive the extermination in Auschwitz and to live up to 96 years: but last night Esther Bejarano died, one of the last survivors of the Auschwitz orchestra, who after the war emigrated to Israel, where he lived for 15 years also experiencing independence, before returning to Germany.
This was revealed by the Anne Frank Education Center in Frankfurt, which also reveals how Bejarano expressed extreme concern in his later years about the rise of the far right and the neo-Nazi movements. "For those who have lived through those things," he said in an interview with Deutsche Welle in 2014, "it is impossible to describe how serious" the growth of anti-Islamic or anti-immigration movements such as AfD or Pegida is.
"Esther Bejarano survived Auschwitz because she played the accordion in the camp women's orchestra. She dedicated her life to music and to fighting anti-Semitism," writes Meron Mendel, who heads the NGO, in a note.
A note, the latter also taken up by the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, who declared that "an important voice against racism and anti-Semitism has left us.
We will miss his voice". Bejarano wrote autobiographical novels and collaborated with the International Committee on Auschwitz.
Born in 1924 in Saarlouis, today in the Rhenish Land of the Saar, in April 1943 at the age of 19 she was deported to Auschwitz, where she lost her parents and sisters, and then moved a few months later to Ravensbruck. In reality she played the piano but, as there were no pianists in the orchestra wanted by the Nazis to "welcome" the deportees who arrived in the cattle-wagons of the trains and distract them from the suspicions of their imminent death.
He had to learn to play the accordion.
"You knew that sooner or later they would have gassed you and all we could do was stay there and play," he told Deutsche Welle. (HANDLE).