1940-44 World War 2 – Internment with Hans Keller, and others

Young Walter Harrison had looked after me for about 6 years, and he had progressed with his violin playing to such an extent that his parents James & Helene had decided they would change me for another instrument which had been bequeathed to Helene by one of her aunts, who recently died in Vienna.  Helene’s brother Hans Keller had brought the violin to London when he managed to escape Hitler’s clutches and find refuge here in England.

Hans was a professionally trained violinist and musician (and psychologist), and an arrangement was made within the family that Hans would take possession of me when young Walter inherited the Viennese fiddle.

Hans Keller took possession of me in 1940, he was on his way to the Hutchinson Internment Camp at Douglas on the Isle of Man, a grand building set up to hold Germans and Austrians (mainly Jews) who were residing in war-time Britain, classified as ‘enemy aliens’.  For me, this was an amazing time, once again linking my English birth-right with the strong influence of Germanic culture and interpretation.  Hans established a string quartet in the camp, gathering friends together who had played with him in Vienna, including Oskar Adler and Egon Wellesz, friends of Arnold Schoenberg.

While we were in this Internment Camp, yet another massive surprise was waiting for me!

My owner Hans Keller began to receive letters from an old friend, Karl Hobf, living in the Sudeten area near the German/Polish/Czech border.  Karl was the grandson of my luthier-restorer Caspar Hopf, who had been so good to me after my neck had been broken when we entered Prussia with Lord Burghersch all those years ago in 1813.

Hans was visibly and audibly moved to read the things Karl was reporting.  He told of a Nazi concentration camp in Gorlitz, not far from the Moravian settlement at Herrnhut (with memories for me of Schlieremacher & Wesley), where the French Catholic composer Olivier Messiaen – another close friend of Hans – was held, along with other musicians. On 15 January 1941, with Jean Le Boulaire (violin), Henri Akoka (clarinet), Etienne Pasquier (cello), Messiaen performed his newly-composed ‘Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps’ [Quartet for the end of time].  It had been inspired by the New Testament Book of Revelation, part of Chapter 10, and interpreted alongside the appalling events of the day. 

(Messiaen with musicians and others at Gorlitz, near Herrnhut)

He also wrote about a ‘transfer’ concentration camp, Theresienstadt (Czech: Terezin) in the occupied Sudeten territories, about 25 miles south of Gorlitz, 40 miles north of Prague.  Here there were large numbers of highly proficient Jewish musicians, performers and composers – including more friends of Hans, Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Hans Krasa, Adolf Strauss – who regularly performed for their Nazi captors in the camp, (and even for a group of visitor/inspectors from the International Red Cross), before all were finally transferred to the death camp at Auschwitz on 15 October 1944.

It was obvious that this news affected Hans deeply, and it affected the way he played me from then on.  As many theologians and philosophers have since asked: ‘How can we speak of God after Auschwitz?’

[As I write, I find it extraordinary that, long after these events, in 1968, Harvey Richardson became very friendly with the Meissner family in Vienna. It was Eduard and Helene Meissner who, after the War in 1945, had been forcibly expelled by the Czech government from their Sudeten home in Haindorf (Czech: Hejnice).  I have assumed that Eduard, a serving soldier in the Wehrmacht, who had seen action on the Russian Front, must have been aware of the horrors of such places as Theresienstadt, especially as it was literally so close to home].

But before the Auschwitz exterminations of Hans’s friends, some of his English friends – including Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst – persuaded the British authorities to release Hans from the internment camp.  For a short, but important time, he was able to rejoin his dear friend Oskar Adler who was now safely residing with family in the Lake District at Ambleside.  We had lots of music-making, and I felt well used and well appreciated!

 Hans was now able to secure a permanent job at the BBC in London, where he later excelled and found fame in the British music world, but often with some notoriety. His thoughts about music and psychoanalysis deserve an entry of their own……next time.