George Horner is a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor and pianist who will be making his orchestral debut with Yo-Yo Ma at the Boston Symphony Hall on Tuesday night; the duo will be playing music composed 70 years ago in the Nazi prison camp where Horner spent years of his life, the Associated Press reported.
All concert proceeds will go to the Terezin Music Foundation, an organization that preserves the work of artists and musicians killed in the Holocaust. Concert organizer Mark Ludwig said "it will be an extraordinary link to the past," the AP reported.
The foundation, which is led by Ludwig, is named after the town of Terezin that contained an unusual Jewish ghetto where Nazi soldiers allowed prisoners to conduct artistic performances despite the hard labor and the constant threat of death, the AP reported.
Ma told the AP he's glad the foundation is "giving voice through music to those whose voices have been tragically silenced."
According to the AP, in Terezin cabarets, Horner, who plays the accordion as well, played songs written by himself and fellow inmate Karel Svenk who did not make it out of the camp, the AP reported. Horner will perform a march and lullaby written by Svenk on Tuesday night, and then a duet with Ma called "How Come the Black Man Sits in the Back of the Bus."
Ludwig, who is a scholar of Terezin composers, happened to meet Horner, who has never forgotten the songs that were composed and performed in the camp. Even with the foundations purpose, Ludwig felt it was a hard request to ask Horner to perform pieces that are attached to such terrible memories, the AP reported.
"To ask somebody who ... played this in the camps, that's asking a lot," Ludwig told the AP.
Horner, who is a retired doctor and currently lives in Philadelphia, took the request as a "noble mission." After Ludwig told him he would be sharing the stage with Ma, he was ecstatic, according to the AP.
"He was so excited, to me he sounded like a teenager," Ludwig said.
"I told him, 'Do you want me to swallow that one?'" Horner said. "I couldn't believe it, because it's a fantastic thing for me."
Horner was freed by the Allied soldiers in 1945 when he was 21-years-old. He was incarcerated not only in Terezin, but in Auschwitz and Buchenwald as well. His family never made it out of the camps, the AP reported.
