From Buchenwald to Carnegie Hall
Memoirs of Filar, a Jewish pianist born in Warsaw in 1917. Describes his youth as a child prodigy, including his early successes despite anti-Jewish discrimination. Pp. 50-115 relate his experiences in the Holocaust. At the outbreak of the war he fled to Lvov, but he returned to Warsaw after the German occupation in 1941. He entered the ghetto, where he first played with the Jewish symphony orchestra, but was soon sent for forced labor. When his parents and several of his six siblings were deported, he and his brother Joel joined a resistance group. They fought during the uprising, but were then caught and deported, first to Majdanek and then to Skarżysko-Kamienna, Buchenwald, and Schlieben. After surviving a death march, they were liberated at Nixdorf. His parents and two siblings perished in the Holocaust. After the war Filar lived in Germany; in 1950 he emigrated to the U.S., where he became a concert pianist and played in Carnegie Hall in 1952.