Symphonic Poem ‘Auschwitz’ by Greek Holocaust Survivor to Debut at Carnegie Hall Concert

Shiryn Ghermezian

Carnegie Hall. Photo: StrangeTraveler/Wikimedia Commons.

A symphonic poem written by an Auschwitz survivor from Greece, who wrote the orchestral music in honor of those killed during the Holocaust, will make its debut at Carnegie Hall in New York City on Wednesday.

Michel Assael wrote the symphonic poem “Auschwitz” in 1947, after being freed from the Nazi extermination camp, but it will heard for the first time publicly this week.

The Carnegie Hall concert is sponsored by the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County, and also pays tribute to Austrian composer and conductor Viktor Ullmann, who was killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The event will honor two Holocaust victims — one who survived and one who was murdered.

“It’s powerful. The first few minutes feels very unresolved and that must be the fear in the beginning of what he was trying to express,” Assael’s daughter, Deborah Assael-Migliore, told CBS News after hearing her father’s 100-plus-page work during a rehearsal. “His whole experience of what he told me when I was growing up, all the stories I’m hearing in his musical language.”

Assael, a Jewish musician and composer from Salonika, Greece, was deported to Auschwitz in 1943, where he played the accordion in an orchestra of prisoners. Assael’s two sisters also survived the war because they were musicians performing in the group.

Dr. Albert Menache, a physician and fellow prisoner at Auschwitz, also played in the orchestra and recommended for Assael to join the group. After his liberation, Dr. Menache wrote a memoir, which inspired Assael to pen a score in memory of all the victims of the Holocaust. The score remained in a box since 1946, never transcribed or performed, until its recent rediscovery. Both Assael and Menache moved to New York after the war.

“For me, personally, I knew my father more as a bandleader, which is how he knew the entire community I grew up in, yet this is a validation of his skills as a serious composer,” Assael-Migliore said to CBS about her father’s work. “On some level, after he wrote a certain amount of composition, he gave up composing. So for this to happen, it’s like his moment. His moment is here and it’s at Carnegie Hall.”