SHE is 14-years old, alone, with neither parents nor grandparents, neither siblings nor cousins. She is in a foreign country, and doesnt know the language. She has been lucky enough to end up as the servant in a family that treats her well. The furnishings are elegant and the surroundings grand. In fact, she has a certain sense for style and color combinations, and is trusted to select the lady of the houses daily clothing. She is paid a very small wage, since she is lucky enough to have a place to stay. After all, this is war time.
She is highly disciplined and does not spend any of her wages. Gradually, over many months, she saves enough for what she wants. She leaves one afternoon, walking two miles to a secondhand bicycle shop and asks for help. She ends up purchasing the type of bicycle she needs, but does not take it home. She asks the proprietor whether she can pick it up at another time of her convenience. The proprietor says its all hers and she can come and get it whenever she wants.
She goes home, tidies up her things and, when the timing is right, leaves a short extremely short note, thanking her mistress and saying goodbye. She goes to the bicycle shop and, with nothing more than the clothes on her back and a small backpacks worth of possessions, rides 45 miles to the city.
She wasnt going to be a servant to this family the rest of her life.
Not to mention, the family didnt let her play the piano.
As I say, she was just 14, totally alone and determined.
LISA Jura was one of the fortunate children to escape from Europe on a Kindertransport. Permit me to skip ahead of the story, but this young teenager actually went door to door in London until she convinced someone to sponsor her sister Sonia, who then got out of Vienna on the very last kindertransport, the day World War II began.
Lisa Jura was a child prodigy. Back in Vienna, the entire neighborhood was mesmerized when she played the piano. The music wafted out of her second-story windows. She studied music professionally; her last lesson was wrenching when her professor, very much against his will, told her she could not return because it was now forbidden for him to teach Jews. It was no more conceivable for her not to play the piano than it was not to breathe. When she got to England, she had to find a way to play the piano. First, of course, she had to escape from her adoptive family, initially to Brighton, peddling 45 miles to get there, then catching the right train to London.
She ended up, together with other child refugees, in a former mental hospital, now converted into a hostel for Jewish children, at 243 Willesden Lane, in Willesden Green, London. There, Lisa had a cot, shared a single drawer with Edith, a single washroom with 17 other girls, with curfew at ten, lights out ten-thirty, no food in the bedrooms, hot bath once a week, telephone calls no longer than one minute, Friday night Shabbos dinner (the only good meal all week long), chores on Saturday and picnic Sundays (to boost morale).
Lisa Juras memoir is told as a narration, and the narrator is her daughter, Mona Golabek, with the help of Lee Cohen, in The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival (Warner Books).
THE hostel on Willesden Lane, Lisa noticed the first time she entered, had a piano. She, like all the residents at Willesden Lane, male as well as female, had to work. Lisas father was a tailor and Lisa was nimble with her fingers. She did well on a tryout in a sewing factory, was told to start the next day, returned home in the middle of the day when the hostel was empty and, as the narrator tells it:
She pictured the living room downstairs and the treasure it held. It was now or never, she thought. She got up, went downstairs, and walked to the piano, gently pulling back the shawl that covered it.
Looking around guiltily, she lifted the lid covering the keys. A Bechstein the professor had told her they were very good pianos. She sat down and stretched her fingers silently over the keys. It had been almost nine months since she had played a piano; would her fingers work at all?
Slowly, she began the opening theme of the Grieg Piano concerto in A Minor. With a shiver of delight, she attacked the keyboard in earnest.
She felt a strange sensation as if someone else were playing and she were only a spectator. She was oblivious to everything. She didnt notice out the window that the nun had stopped watering the hyacinths next door or that Mrs. Glazer [one of the supervisors of this rambunctious group of teens] had come out of the kitchen and was peeking in from the foyer.
Finally, during a soft, lyrical passage, Lisas reverie was interrupted by footsteps. She turned to see Paul, the blond boy, trying to shut the front door quietly so she wouldnt be disturbed.
Please don’t stop, it sounds so lovely, he said, smiling.
Lisa played on as one by one the children arrived home. Even before they could open the door they heard the music, hypnotic and beautiful. Without saying a word, they gathered in the living room, on the stairs anywhere they could hear. . . .
And so it was that against the Nazi bombers that would blitz London, with the brave defenders of freedom sticking it out in the city, one small group of soon-to-be orphaned children heard the weapon of one little girl, who chose her Grieg Piano Concerto in A Minor, including its thunderous third movement, to drown out the sounds of those evil bombers, to fight Nazis with the only tools at her disposal, to play and to keep playing in order to boost her own morale, now devastated as the letters from her family in Vienna stopped, and to boost the morale of her kindertransport refugees, of her supervisors and her neighbors, the Catholic nuns. She hurled chord after chord into the threatening skies, answering each explosion with one of her own.
On that first day she discovered the piano, when she was done with Grieg, she began Beethovens 32 Variations in C Minor; she hoped she would remember the notes. And she did.
When her sister Sonia arrived on Friday, September 1, 1939, Sonia was placed in northern England. Lisa and her sister would be separated. However, and Lisa had forgotten this, her stay at Willesden Lane was only to be temporary. For this little home had been issued only 30 ration books, and Lisa was the 32nd person. Mrs. Cohen called Lisa in and said:
Wed be willing to tighten our belts a little bit, if youd like to stay.
Lisa bowed her head in gratitude and to hide the tears that were being shed all too often. She nodded yes. Thank you very much, she whispered.
Mrs. Cohen: Thats settled, then. Please close the door behind you.
So began the dark night, and the light years of music, that lay ahead.
ONE of the boys at Willesden Lane was Gunter. He was arrested one day because a seatmate on the bus saw him writing a letter in German. Only with luck and influence was he rescued from prison.
Another one of the boys was Johnny, very large and socially awkward. One day he gave Lisa something private. She unfolded the piece of paper and found a poem:
Always I see the faces
The faces at the station
The faces at the station
Are dimming before my eyes . . .
Always I hear the voices
The voices that are calling
That are calling out to me
But yet I cannot answer.
My mother, my father,
My sister, my brother
They are here now
Always
My heart is with them.
Johnny signed up for the rescue squad. The blitz was in full swing. Youre only 15, John, Mrs. Cohen said, chastising him.
I wasnt asked my age, maam. Only my weight.
IN spring of 1941, Mrs. Cohen discovered a notice, which she shared with Lisa. Auditions for scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music. Applications being accepted through April 1. Open to all students with a proficiency in music performance of the classical repertoire.
Lisa could not afford the application fee.
Lisa had had no formal training for three years.
She did not even have anything much better than tattered clothing to wear.
Most important of all, she did not have a repertoire sophisticated enough, rounded enough, to offer her a decent chance.
She did, however, have drive, and admirers.
One of those admirers raised the application fee from an extraordinarily cynical skeptic a skeptic, that is, until he heard her play.
Another admirer found some clothing. Most important, Mrs. Cohens 13-year-old son mustered the gumption to build on his own knowledge of music theory to convince Lisa that she must reach beyond her abilities, must undertake, in two short months, to learn many parts of the classical repertoire that she had never studied.
This refugee girl arrived at the Royal Academy with all the other contestants, who were dressed as was only suitable for the institution and the occasion, rich with supportive parents and friends, their professors having richly tutored them.
Lisa, burdened with separations, adjusted her weight on the piano bench, tested the pedals quickly to judge their spring, took a deep breath, and began.
The opening notes of the sonata were solemn, the tempo measured and deliberate. For Lisa, it was a call to prayer. It was as profound and heartfelt as the lighting of the candles on her parents mantelpiece. She saw the care in her mothers hands as she kindled the flame of Shabbat, and relived the warmth of the glowing dining room in the harmonies of the dramatic chords.
Then out of the gravity of this call to prayer came the energy and bustle of the con brio. Her hands flew lightly into the trills and arpeggios, speeding up and down the keyboard. She imagined the energy was like the preparations for the Sabbath meal. She saw the playfulness of her sister Sonia scurrying in and out with the plates . . .
Thank you, she heard between the notes near the end of the first movement. She suddenly realized that the judges had let her go on for 10 whole minutes. Oh, no, she thought, that means only 10 minutes to go and I havent shown them the ballade!
Perhaps you could play your prelude and fugue next.
She wanted to say: No, no, you must hear the Chopin! But she bowed graciously and began Bachs Fugue in D Minor. . . .
Thank you, said the small lady in the dark suit. And what have you prepared from the Romantic period?
I will play Chopins Ballade in G Minor, opus 23, number 1.
Again no reaction, just the movement of pens making notes in their mysterious books. . . .
Lisas mother had told her that in this ballade, Chopin was crying for the loss of his native Poland at having to flee war and destruction, never to return. It was a tribute to his lost homeland. Lisas fingers sang her own nostalgic tribute to Vienna, now lost to her, and to her parents and Rosie, and even Sonia, so far from her.
She laid her heart bare as her fingers moved almost without conscious effort. At one point, she realized that a tear was falling down her cheek, but she paid it no mind. . . .
Another Thank you broke into her reverie, and she realized with alarm that she had played the entire piece without being interrupted. Maybe they had tried to stop her and she hadnt heard them. How embarrassing!
That is all, you may go, was all she got by way of response . . .
Gunter was waiting in the hallway. How was it? How did you do? he asked, anxious for the news.
I did everything I could. I gave it my all.
I, however, shall give no more of this wrenching, inspiring, shimmering story . . . of Lisa, of Johnny, of Sonia, of Gunter, of reports of the Jewish Holocaust, of teens maturing into success, into war, into death, and into dispersal around the globe, of the shuttering of the hostel on Willesden Lane, of the music of her soul that is eternal. Go. Go to The Children of Willesden Lane.
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
