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An Interview with
Richard Newman
Amadeus Press: How did you discover the Alma Rosé story? Richard: In Professor Alfred Rosé's study in London, Ontario, there was a small postcard-sized photographic image: his ecstatically happy sister Alma and her handsome husband, the violin virtuoso who thrilled audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, Vasa Prihoda. It was a rare introduction to Alfred's remarkable sister. Days before Alfred died, he finally talked about Alma, saying that he was led to believe that Alma saved the lives of many Jewish girls in the orchestra she directed in Auschwitz-Birkenau. As the co-executor of Alfred's estate, with his widow, Maria, I found Alma's story taking over my family's and my lives. Contents of a mildewed horsehide truck in the Rosé cellar sealed the beginning of my “life sentence." There were letters revealing the epic dimensions of the tragic story of a gifted woman violinist of high temperament. The scope of them called for a view from the last decades of 19th-century Vienna before her birth until her death in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. The points of departure on this journey with musical nobility: her uncle Gustav Mahler; her mother, Justine Mahler, the composer's sister; her father, the great orchestra leader and chamber musician Arnold Rosé; and strong links with Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini, Richard Strauss, Willem Mengelberg, Arnold Schoenberg and countless other historically important musicians. AP: You researched her story for 16 years. What were one or two of the most interesting encounters you had with people? R: One of the most amazing unlocked the story of Alma's adventures in Nazi-occupied Holland. While a journalist at The London Free Press in Ontario, I had seen in that mildewed trunk a letter from a Miss Marieanne Tellegen, from Holland, to Arnold Rosé, who was a refugee in England. My first call to the Dutch Embassy in Ottawa was to the press officer, to identify Miss Tellegen. Frustrated when the young officer could not help, I called back and asked for the first secretary. Answering this time was the chargé d'affaires, Jan-Herman Van Roijen, who later became a high official in the Dutch foreign ministry. His name opened up many avenues of investigation in Holland and France - his name alone was a password. Another time, on a cold dark Viennese November night in 1985, I was walking in Döbling. At the foot of Pyrkergasse, the street where the Rosés had lived, I noted a man with an immense black dog talking with a neighbor. When the two parted, I hurried and knocked at the door which was then closing, through which the man with the dog had gone. It turned out that this was Fritz Krenn, an oboist and lieder singer who had known the Rosés as neighbors. After he showed me memorabilia surrounding his own famous family, he asked to be excused while he made a phone call. He had forgotten to give happy birthday greetings to an 80-year-old friend. He explained my presence and in minutes arranged for me to interview Anita Ast, a violinist who had gone to school with Alma and whom Alma had wanted to be the concertmistress of her orchestra, the Viennese Waltzing Girls, that toured Europe in the 1930s. AP: Are you still in contact with any of the women in the orchestra? R: Until the book was published, I kept contact, for there were always questions to be answered. The manuscript took shape with the huge effort of co-author Karen Kirtley, with whom there was constant e-mail. A Polish violinist in the orchestra, Helena Dunicz Niwinska (whose mother died in Birkenau), wrote me out of the blue. On one of her regular visits to Auschwitz from Cracow, she went to the Auschwitz Museum. She was shown a letter I'd written the museum a few years earlier. It prompted her to write me complaining that there was no mention of Alma in musical lexicons at the time. She became a vital contact, even providing the best list of players in the camp orchestra. The cellist of Alma's orchestra in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Anita Lasker Wallfisch, living in England, was the most outspoken challenger of the Fania Fénelon book. She frequently answered questions, and I telephoned her after she had an interview with The Sunday Times which unearthed many who had been part of the lives of Alma and Arnold when in exile in England. Not only that, but when she was on tour in North America with the English Chamber Orchestra, she strongly supported Alfred's desire to preserve the Mahler memorabilia in the University of Western Ontario's Mahler-Rosé Room. AP: What is the major difference in the way her story is told in the movie Playing for Time and in your book? R: I don't think a comparison should be made. Fania's book has been widely read and was greatly admired. It and the film have also been challenged widely. Yet I am almost sure that fewer would know (at least until our Alma book) that there was a women's orchestra in Auschwitz-Birkenau, if she and her writer hadn't produced the work. It might even have "flavored" some memories of those young girls in their advancing senior years. The authority on Auschwitz from the inmates' side, the late Hermann Langbein, told me to accept the eyewitness accounts that were made immediately after the liberation of the camp. He said memories could change over time. As Anita Lasker Wallfisch says: "Alma could not defend herself against the charges that Fania leveled against her." Therefore I will not condemn Fania's book, but say we tell the story of Alma as I found it. Almost every woman I interviewed, or from whom I had letters, challenged both book and film. AP: Is there an especially interesting story about how this book has touched a reader that you know about? R: One of the most interesting is Mrs. Wallfisch's. She has volunteered to work on the Auschwitz chapters for the German edition, planned for release late in 2002 for Weidle Verlag. Reactions to the book have come from both sides of the Atlantic. Among the earliest and most telling was that of James R. Oestreich, music critic and editor at The New York Times. He introduced discussion of the book in his report on the Mauthausen memorial concert by the Vienna Philharmonic in 2000. If Arnold Rosé were alive, he would have been proud, for in his last letter to his son Alfred in 1946 he found it in his heart - broken over Alma's death - to say that even if there were Nazis in the orchestra, the orchestra must be saved.
An author biography is also available.
Books by
Richard Newman:
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