A violin made by a prisoner in Dachau identified 80 years later

80 years after the release of the Dachau concentration camp by American troops on April 29, 1945, two Hungarian art collectors, Szandra Katona and Tamás Talosi, discovered that they owned a violin made by a former detainee, report the Euronews television channel and the American news agency AP News.

“It all started in an ordinary way”, tells Szandra Katona in an interview on her YouTube channel. After storing the violin for ten years in a dresser, the two art merchants wanted to repair it and sent him to a specialist by the name of Szabó Tomás. First surprised by the poor quality of the wood, the luthier found a label on which he was written “KL Dachau”. Visible from the outside of the instrument, the inscription suggested that it came from the Nazi concentration camp.

By dismantling the instrument, Szabó Tomás then discovered a piece of paper where the following sentence was scribbled there : “Test instrument, manufactured under difficult conditions, without tools or materials. Dachau. Year 1941, Franciszek Kempa. »» The professional then called the owners and read them the message out loud. Szandra Katona admits having shed a few tears at this announcement: “The luthier contacted us and said to us: Do you know what you have in your hands?” And he read us the registration […]I could not believe that we had such an object ”.

An instrument made by a Polish luthier

It is very likely that the violin is the only roping instrument today kept, entirely made inside the Dachau camp. From the documents made available to them, the specialists think that the Nazis knew that Franciszek Kampa was luthier. Collector Tamas Talosi even goes so far as to suggest that it was precisely his profession that allowed him to ” survive “, Unlike the other 40,000 prisoners who died of hunger, cold or bad punishment. According to the archives of the Dachau Memorial Museum, Franciszek Kempa survived the concentration camps and returned to Poland after the war, where he continued to make instruments. He died in 1953. We do not know how the violin ended up in Hungary.

In tribute to its history, the two owners baptized the instrument. “We called it the “Violin of Hope” Because if someone finds himself in a difficult situation, having a task to accomplish or a challenge to take up the aid to overcome many things ”, tells the art merchant Tamás Tálosi. According to Radio Classique, the two Hungarian owners are currently in negotiations so that the violin is temporarily exposed to the Dachau Holocaust museum.