Playing to live: Pianist survived Holocaust by performing for Nazis

Yuka S.

Posting #4

Topic: Civil Rights

Author: Moni Basu

Publication Name: CNN
Date of Publication: May 12, 2012

2168 words

Main idea

This Saturday, Atlanta’s Oglethorpe University will honor Zhanna Arshanskaya Dawson with a D.Litt, and Zhanna will march down the aisle along with another honoree, CNN founder Ted Turner.  She was recognized for being a “woman who played the piano in the vein for Vlamidir Horowitz but with the modesty of an unknown” and for “her indomitable spirit, courage, honesty, and sense of purpose.”  Dawson, whose name was engraved on the wall of an underground memorial in Ukraine, was presumed dead, like the 16,000 other Jews from Kharkov who died under the Nazis in the winter of 1941.  Dawson escaped the death march by playing music for the Nazis, and after the war, she made a living as an accomplished pianist in the US, and kept silent on her history until her sons had grown up. 

Dawson began playing when she was 5, and a year later, she performed Bach’s Invention Number 1 in public.  Her father, Dimitri Arshansky, encouraged both his daughters to study music at a local conservatory, where a professor introduced Zhanna to Chopin’s “Fantasy Impromptu.” Zhanna’s peaceful life at the conservatory was ruined in 1941, when the Nazis invaded Kharkov during WWII.  Dawson remembers seeing bodies of Jews hanging from lampposts.  In December, German soldiers shoved her entire family out of their home and into a long line of Jews forced to march 12 miles out of the city in the bitter cold and snow.  The Nazis forced 13,000 Jews into an abandoned tractor factory designed to hold 1,800 people, and without warmth or food, many people died there.  After that, the remaining people were to be sent to Dobritsky Yar, where the Nazis killed 34,000 Jews in two days.  During the transport, Dimitri Arshansky bribed a guard to let Zhanna go, saying to Zhanna, “I don’t care what you do... Just live.”  Obtaining fake identities, Zhanna and her sister, the latter who somehow escaped and was too traumatized to talk about it, got a job with a musical troupe that entertained the Germans.  Her music was the only spot of beauty in that bleak atmosphere, as she constantly had to fear being found out and shot on the spot. 

Conclusion

Dawson is excited to be earning her first degree, at age 85, since war has kept her from high school, and marriage drew her away from attending Julliard.  She has not played piano for over a decade, when she developed carpal tunnel syndrome and decided to give up what she loved most in life.  Since then, she disposed of her baby grand and upright that used to occupy her living room, and filled the space with glass-front cabinets bearing family photographs and memento, none of which gives away the suffering that she endured.