This violin belonged to Abram Merczynski of Łódź, Poland. In August 1944, Abram and his brothers Isak and Zysman were deported from the Łódź Ghetto to Auschwitz, and later to Dachau. Abram, then 21, carried his violin with him and played wherever he was, even in the Kaufering labor camp, a subcamp of Dachau.
Remarkably, Abram, his brothers, and the violin all survived. After the war, while living in Munich with a German family named Sesar, Abram purchased a new violin. He gave his old one—the instrument that had accompanied him through years of persecution—to the family’s 14-year-old son, Julius Sesar.
Abram later emigrated to the United States in 1955, where he lived to the age of 88. His daughter, Eleanor, recalled that he never stopped playing the violin. Decades later, Julius Sesar, now elderly himself, passed the violin to his friend, violin maker Eberhard Thiessen. From him, it entered the Violins of Hope project, where it continues to play and to tell a story of survival, music, and friendship.
