The Fiddle

Footsteps Team member Simon today spent a fascinating couple of hours in the company of author Natlaie Cumming, whose book The Fiddle tells an incredible story of survival.

The sleeve notes for the book state:
A true story, tracing a precious violin across landscapes devastated by war and terror, to safety and restoration in 21st century Britain. Abraham and his family flee the Bolsheviks, from St. Petersburg to Odessa and safety in the UK. Abraham’s skill on the violin earns them food and lodgings, as they struggle through the freezing Russian winter. The violin passes to Rosa, Abraham’s daughter, violinist with the famous Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Arrested by the Nazis on Kristellnacht 1938 she is sent to Mauthausen Concentration Camp, and then to Auschwitz, where her musical talent sees her forced to join the Women’s Orchestra and saves her life. She spends the last 5 months of the war in Belsen, before testifying at the Nuremberg Trials, exposing the horrors of the Nazi death camps. Rosa’s brother Israel, inherits the violin. A celebrated musician, he joins ENSA during the war, entertaining the troops. Post war, he investigates Nazis trying to escape trial. He forms several popular bands, well-known throughout the 60’s & 70’s.Finally, the violin comes to his daughter Natalie, who has written her family’s extraordinary story, lest the world should ever forget global events, against which the journey of this beautiful instrument is told.

This is certainly a book worth reading. Natalie has researched the history of the violin and her family with diligence. It is hoped that at some point the story will be made into either a film or a serialised television programme.

Natalie Cumming and Simon Bell

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a year ago

Re: Nazis who escaped their earned sentences

The guy, Dr. Joseph Mengele, received a "sentence" that I believe was an insult to the entire world.
I don't care if people were able to forgive him or not. He should have stayed in prison the rest of his natural life.
I was a paramedic, but even I knew things he claims he DIDN'T know. As a "doctor."
I think doctors knew then what paramedics have known for over 20 years; we know exactly "how much blood it will take for someone to go into shock & how much blood loss will kill a person. I don't think they needed to do THAT to find out. I think, they could've discovered the answer by watching people on the battlefield of WW1.
I feel angry about his lack of serious sentencing and I don't understand how people in the medical field could have ignored signs that are brutally obvious to me today, as a paramedic with one year of training and 10 years experience.
In almost all the propaganda films, it was obvious the people in them are starting into severe starvation.
Are they going to tell me no doctor could've seen that then?
Rod Serling was right: "It was a time when people checked their conscience and left it behind them at the gate."