Clara Schumann Wieck learned to compose, and from childhood to middle age she produced a good body of work. Clara wrote that "composing gives me great pleasure... there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound". At age fourteen she wrote her piano concerto, with some help from Robert Schumann, and performed it at age sixteen at the Leipzig Gewandhaus with Mendelssohn conducting. As she grew older, however, she became more preoccupied with other responsibilities in life and found it hard to compose regularly,
Michael Wieck in Scotland in a "Kindertransporte", taking the place of another German-Jewish girl who had gone to the United States. Thus, she survived the war. Shortly thereafter, young Michael Wieck was compelled to work in factories. In mid-1941 Wieck celebrated his Bar Mitzva in the small Orthodox synagogue "Adass Jisroel", as the main Jewish synogogue of Königsberg had been destroyed in the Nazi ""Kristallnacht"" pogrom of November 1938. During the pogrom perpetrators vandalized the interior of the Orthodox synagogue hall, but spared it from arson because it was housed in a residential building. Later the congregation restored a prayer hall in