Klara Benjamin-Belkin was a Holocaust survivor who came to Canada when the Vienna orchestra wasn’t hiring women musicians. The principal cellist for the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra for 20 years, she was a member of the faculty at the University of Manitoba’s School of Music. In the winters, she and her late husband, Emile, a violinist, were also members of the Tampa Symphony Orchestra.
At 95, she is still performing, and a recent invitation from world renowned violinist Joshua Bell is bringing her career full circle. She will join Bell and the Columbus Symphony Orchestra in September for a performance that hits close to home.
The concert will feature the soundtrack of The Train Near Magdeburg, a four-part documentary about a locomotive packed with prisoners from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp that was intercepted and then liberated by American soldiers in April 1945.
One episode of the miniseries premiered last May, and the second episode is currently in production, with hopes for wider international distribution for the finished product through the U.K.-based ITV Studios.
The story is personal for Benjamin-Belkin. She, her mother and her brother were on that train.
Originally from Szeged, Hungary, she and her family were interned in ghettos during the Second World War. In June 1944, she, her mother and her brother were taken to Austria as farm labourers. Her father had already been conscripted into the Hungarian army. In December 1944, they—along with her grandparents—were moved to Bergen-Belsen.
“I was lucky in that I was in relatively good health and I was with most of my family,” she said of her time in the concentration camp.
However, by April 1945, with the Russians closing in, it looked like luck was about to run out for the 15-year-old and the other surviving prisoners at Bergen-Belsen. They were loaded onto boxcars and sent toward Theresienstadt where they feared death awaited them. Their journey came to an end however on April 13 on the banks of the Elbe River near Magdeburg. A bridge had been destroyed and the train could go no farther. There were reports that the train was to be driven into the river or blown up. Before that could happen, the American army arrived on the scene.
“We couldn’t see anything from inside the boxcars,” Benjamin-Belkin recalls. “Suddenly it went quiet. The SS guards had run away. We heard honking outside and then knocking on the boxcar doors. The doors were opened and we saw an American soldier with a gun aimed at us. He couldn’t believe what he saw. He was no doubt expecting to see German soldiers or munitions. Instead, he saw a boxcar full of half-dead people.”
She remembers that they were all moved to a nearby village from which the residents had been evacuated: “There were many of us who had typhus and many, including my grandfather, died shortly after liberation.”
Fortunately, her mother, brother and grandmother also survived. After liberation, she returned to Budapest where the family reconnected with her father and she studied cello at the Franz Liszt Academy. Following the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, she was able to leave Budapest, with the encouragement of her mother, for Vienna.
In Vienna, however, the symphony was not hiring any female musicians. So she came to Canada and found a position with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.
That was also where she met her husband, Emile, a violin player, who was also a member of the orchestra.
About 15 years ago, Benjamin-Belkin had an opportunity to meet two of the American soldiers who liberated her and her family. It started when her daughter Lisa decided to write her mother’s biography. In the course of her research, she came across a recording of a 2007 interview ABC News journalist Diane Sawyer had conducted with Hudson Falls, N.Y., history teacher Matt Rozell, who ultimately compiled his research into a book.
Join us on January 29 at 3 PM as we come together to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. We’ll be joined by author and educator Matthew Rozell, who will share the story of “A Train Near Magdeburg.” The program is free, but registration is required. https://t.co/xS26DOCFU0 pic.twitter.com/4xtBU7B8KZ
— Holocaust Center (@holocaustcenter) January 25, 2023
Rozell had his students interview surviving Second World War veterans living in the area. First Lieutenant Frank Towers, liaison officer of the 30th Infantry Division, and former tank commander Carrol Walsh (743rd Tank Battalion, 119th Regiment) were among the interviewees. They were the last two living American soldiers from the unit who saved her and the other Jewish prisoners—600 of them children—from almost certain death.
Klara, Emile and Lisa Belkin met the two veterans in Florida in February 2011. “I was never able to put a face to my liberators before,” Klara said at the time.
It was Frank Towers’ duty to arrange food, shelter and care for the former prisoners. Belkin reports that Towers and Walsh frequently spoke about their war experiences and had been invited to the Weizmann Institute in Israel where they met with Bergen-Belsen historian Bernd Horstmann.
Belkin said that a reunion in Israel with Towers, Walsh, Rozell and some of the boxcar survivors was talked about, but nothing came of it. Today, she is the oldest survivor of those who were on that train—and the only Canadian among them.
