In her new memoir, “The Cello Still Sings,” musician Janet Horvath depicts the harrowing history of her family under Nazi rule during the Second World War, as well as her family’s passion for music.
Musician Janet Horvath knew her father, George Horvath, was a brilliant cellist — she took up the instrument herself because of him — and then their shared love of music opened a closed door to his past as a Holocaust survivor.
“It was a slushy, yucky, snowy day in Toronto. I was driving my father to see a doctor,” she said, reflecting on the day in 2009 when secrets began to unfold. Leonard Bernstein led an orchestra of 17 Jewish musicians, concentration camp survivors — including George Horvath — who were bused twice a week to play morale-boosting concerts in displaced persons camps from 1946 to ’48. Horvath found photos of her father with the young conductor from that era and tracked down a printed program of the Bernstein concerts at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.
She spent 10 years in total travelling across Europe and trying to piece their story together. In her new memoir, “The Cello Still Sings,” she depicts the harrowing history of her family under Nazi rule during the Second World War, as well as her family’s passion for music. “My father thought it was a death sentence to be discarded as a slave in the mines, but it saved him from being sent to Auschwitz,” said Janet Horvath, who believes her father evaded death more than once by being a musician. “The Germans loved their music, there were orchestras in all the concentration camps. Music was my father’s lifeline.”
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