DEL.ICIO.USHOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY
Atlanta woman recalls Holocaust, playing piano for Nazis
‘Hiding in the Spotlight’, a book about her life, to be published in June
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, April 20, 2009
Her hair was in pigtails and her white dress was new when Zhanna Arshansky took the stage in a little theater in Ukraine in 1942. The 15-year-old piano prodigy played Chopin, Brahms, and Schubert, all from memory. When she was done, the men in the audience rose to their feet and shouted “Noch einmal!” “Once more!”
Some of the cheering men wore the black uniform of the SS. Some were field generals in Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Not one of the Nazi officers listening to her play knew her secret — that she was Jewish.
•Photos: Holocaust remembrance ceremony in Atlanta
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Zhanna and her younger sister, Frina, had escaped from a Nazi massacre of the entire Jewish population of their city, then found themselves forced to entertain soldiers from the army that had killed their parents.
“We were scared to death,” she says now. At age 82, vibrant, beautiful and impeccably groomed in her Atlanta condo, Zhanna Arshansky Dawson will spend Holocaust Remembrance Day today as she spends many days, listening to classical music on the radio, and remembering the unbelievable saga of her teen-age years.
That story will be told in “Hiding in the Spotlight,” a book by her son Greg Dawson, a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, to be published in June by Pegasus Books.
She thinks about what happened every day, she says. “I do a lot of crying. I cannot not be touched by what the Germans did.”
At the urging of friends, Zhanna recently started attending Congregation Beth Jacob in Atlanta. But she spent nearly all her life as a non-religious Jew; when she and her husband David were raising their family in Bloomington, Ind., she did not even tell her children that she was Jewish, let alone a Holocaust survivor.
“How can I tell a story so horrifying to my little children?” she asks now.
That story starts in Kharkov, the Ukrainian city where Zhanna was living with her family in 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. The Nazis ordered about 16,000 Jews to leave Kharkov in a forced march in the snow, including Zhanna, Frina, and their parents. They did not know that a few months earlier, the Nazis had machine-gunned 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar, and buried them in mass graves. Her family was headed toward a similar fate when her father bribed a Ukrainian guard with his gold pocket watch, took off his coat and draped it over her shoulders.
“I don’t care what you do,” he told her. “Just live!”
She ducked out of the throng and hid behind a bale of barbed wire. Soon she was making her way, alone, through the winter countryside. Her parents and thousands of Jews were massacred soon after at Drobitsky Yar.
To this day, Zhanna does not know how her sister Frina later escaped as well; the younger girl would not speak about it. The sisters, both of whom had growing reputations as gifted piano prodigies, eventually found themselves in an orphanage, where a piano tuner heard them play.
They had assumed false identities as Gentiles to try to stay safe from the Nazis. “Our story was our father was killed in the Russian Army and our mother was killed by a bomb, and we had relatives we were waiting for,” she says.
The piano tuner introduced them to a theater director who had been tasked with providing entertainment for the occupying Nazis, and recognized their talent. Zhanna and Frina had no choice.
“We were scared to death someone we had known would spot us,” she recalls. “But we said we’d better do it, cause if we don’t, we’re finished.”
“Always it was in our minds to run away, but there was no way,” she says. They were probably safer working for the Nazis than they would have been on the run.
When the war ended, Zhanna was one of millions of refugees. Then 18 years old, she was in a United Nations camp when Larry Dawson, a classical music aficionado and camp administrator, heard her play. Larry and his wife adopted the sisters and brought them to America, where they attended Juilliard School of Music. In 1947, Zhanna Arashansky married Larry Dawson’s brother David.
Zhanna doesn’t play piano any more; pains in her shoulder and back make it difficult. She stays in touch with Frina, who lives in Milwaukee.
She cherishes one item that she brought out, the only thing that has survived her 68-year journey. Just as her family was leaving Kharkov, she ran back inside her house and grabbed the sheet music to Chopin’s Fantasy Impromptu. She stuffed it inside her shirt. That yellowed sheet music, in Cyrillic, has made it all the way to Atlanta, along with Zhanna Arshansky Dawson.
On the Web: www.hidinginthespotlight.com
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