In May 2021, the Warsaw City Council's Municipal Naming Committee decided to name one of Warsaw's streets after Mieczysław Weinberg. Almost six months earlier, a commemorative plaque was placed on the facade of a house at Żelazna 66, announcing that Mieczysław Weinberg, a world-renowned composer of Jewish descent, was born in this house. He lived and composed in Moscow from 1943. His oeuvre includes cantatas, symphonies, concertos, string quartets, and sonatas. He is renowned for composing the opera "The Passenger," which explores the crimes committed by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He remained deeply connected to Polish culture, Jewish heritage, and his hometown until the end of his life.
Mieczysław Weinberg in Warsaw in the Roaring 20s and 30s
"I was born in Warsaw, graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory, and was raised on Polish poetry and in an environment that revered Chopin's music. In Poland, so deeply afflicted by suffering, the ashes of my father, my mother, and my sister, murdered by fascists during World War II , are buried," Mieczysław Weinberg himself wrote in an article published in "Sowietskaja Muzika" in 1969.
The composer was born on December 8, 1919, almost at the dawn of Poland's independence. His father, Szmul (Samuel) Weinberg, was a violinist and conductor leading theater orchestras. In the 20s, he headed the Jewish music department at Syrena Records. Records survive today, recordings of Weinberg's father conducting the orchestra and as a solo violinist. However, much less is known about the composer's mother. Her name was Sara or Sura Dwojra and she was likely associated with Jewish theaters, either as an actor or pianist. She may have used the pseudonym or maiden name Sara Kotlicka. The actress Sonia Weinberg also performed in Warsaw's Jewish theaters, but her family connection to Szmul Weinberg is unclear. Mieczysław also had a musically gifted younger sister, Estera (born in 1921), who, like her older brother, played the piano.
Weinberg's son began working as a pianist very early, supporting the family during the difficult years of the 30s Depression. He was just over 11 years old at the time. Years later, he recalled his childhood and youth, which he spent playing at traditional Jewish weddings and bar mitzvahs, practicing classical repertoire during lessons at the Conservatory, and performing at well-known nightclubs like "Oaza" and "Adria," where he played fashionable dance tunes. Loda Halama herself wrote about the young pianist with admiration. They met on a film set: the dancer with a legendary figure and beautiful legs was the star of the production "Fredek Uszczęja świat" (Fredek Makes the World Happy), while Mieczysław composed the musical score. They also worked together on live stage performances; Weinberg was the pianist accompanying Loda Halama on her tour.
The wartime fate of the Weinbergs
The wartime fate of twenty-year-old Mietek is well known: he managed to escape to the Soviet Union and reached Minsk, where he graduated from the conservatory. After the Third Reich attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, he managed to leave Belarus. He reached Tashkent, where he married Natalia Wowsi-Mikhoels, daughter of the renowned actor and Jewish theater director Solomon Mikhoels. In 1943, the young couple moved to Moscow, which became the composer's new home. Mieczysław Weinberg lived there until his death in 1996. However, the whereabouts of his father, mother, and younger sister, Esther, are unknown, as the Weinberg family was separated during World War II.
The prevailing version of events in the Russian press was that the family separated in Warsaw in early September 1939. More than 50 years later, Mieczysław Weinberg recounted how he left the city on September 6th with his sister, after an evening concert at the Adria and a late-night conference with his mother. He made his way to the border alone and found himself among a group of refugees waiting to be admitted to the USSR.
Official version
We reached the demarcation line. On one side stood Nazi troops, on the other Soviet border guards – this is how Lyudmila Nikitina recounted the composer's memoirs in the magazine "Muzykalnaya Akademija" in 1994. " A unit was organized to check documents. They did it carelessly, because there were so many people waiting in line. When they approached me, they asked: 'Surname?' – 'Weinberg' – 'First name?' – 'Mieczysław' – 'What's a Mieczysław? A Jew?' – 'A Jew' – 'Then you'll be Mojsej . '"
However, family and friends called him Mietek. In the mid-80s, the composer managed to officially "regain" his name by changing his personal details. This wasn't easy, because, as he confessed in an interview, he didn't have a birth certificate, and his archives had burned down. Did those missing documents actually contain the name Mieczysław? A few years ago, musicologist Danuta Gwizdalanka managed to locate a birth certificate preserved among the records of the Warsaw University of Music. Weinberg began his studies at the conservatory in 1931, and on his application, the first name was spelled Mojsze. In either case, the composer wanted to be called and remembered as Mieczysław, who began his career in Warsaw in the 30s.
The sources regarding the circumstances in which the composer left Warsaw in 1939 and when he separated from his family are equally ambiguous. In the USSR, it was officially written and said that Weinberg's parents had no intention of leaving Warsaw. However, family traditions have preserved more details that contradict this: the four Weinbergs were mentioned as having been held in a camp, where they waited for permission to enter the USSR, but were denied such permission. According to this story, only Mietek managed to board the train that took him abroad.
Natalia, the composer's first wife, recalled that the Weinbergs had planned to leave Warsaw together, but only separated while marching in a column of refugees. Ester's parents stayed behind because her shoe heel broke and they didn't want to leave her alone. Consequently, they missed the train Mietek took alone and attempted to cross the border on his own. Mieczysław and his closest family members may have self-censored their official statements and biographies – openly stating that the USSR refused to help some Jews fleeing the Nazi system could have exposed him to trouble. Maintaining silence regarding the painful experiences of his youth may also have been a strategy for coping with trauma. Weinberg was reluctant to talk about his past and the loss of loved ones during the Holocaust, but he explored these themes in his music.
What did Mieczysław Weinberg know?
The composer himself believed his parents had perished in the Warsaw Ghetto. He later learned they had been transported to the Łódź Ghetto and then to the Trawniki labor camp. At least that's what the interviews he gave and documents discovered by his biographers suggest. It's worth remembering this when listening to his 21st symphony—the last one he completed before his death. The piece is subtitled "Kaddish" and is dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto. Kaddish, one of the most important prayers of Judaism, is recited, among other times, during funeral ceremonies.
Apparently, the composer received information about his father's deportation to Trawniki from a former Warsaw neighbor. Mieczysław met him during his stay in Warsaw in 1966 at the "Warsaw Autumn" festival. This information has not been confirmed to this day. While the name Wajnberg appears among lists of artists imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, this information likely pertains to actor Janek Wajnberg and actress Sonia Wajnberg, perhaps Szmul's sister or Mieczysław's father's first wife. Among those sent to the Trawniki labor camp, which operated on the site of a pre-war sugar factory, was Emanuel Ringelblum, a historian and founder of the Warsaw Ghetto Archive. However, it has not yet been confirmed whether any of the composer's immediate family actually ended up in this camp.
The Weinbergs in Łuniniec
There is another story about the death of the Weinberg family, found in Zalmen Zylbercwaig's "Lexicon of Yiddish Theater." According to this version, Shmuel Weinberg led a cinema orchestra during the war and was murdered in Luninets in the Polesie region, a town located about 60 km east of Pinsk.
Until September 1939, Luninets belonged to Poland, then was occupied by the Red Army and incorporated into the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic as so-called Western Belarus. From July 1941, the town came under German occupation, and already in the summer of that year, mass murders of the Jewish population took place in the Mogul forest. At that time, the victims were primarily adult males who were not artisans. Between March and September 1942, a ghetto was established there, housing approximately 3,000 Jews, a third of whom were refugees. All were murdered in the Borovsky Forest.
Perhaps the Weinbergs were among the Jews allowed into the USSR, and their artistic experiences and qualifications piqued the interest of the authorities, who were seeking intellectuals and artists of Jewish descent among the refugees. They were assigned jobs based on their qualifications. There is a story about young musicians from the Warsaw Conservatory who, after escaping to the Soviet-occupied territories, initially worked in a sawmill in the Baranowicze region. One day, one of them, Henryk Wagner, played the piano and was subsequently sent to Minsk.
Young Weinberg was also said to be among this group, and Baranovichi is located just over 100 km north of Luninets, where Weinberg Sr. was supposed to have worked. By the end of 1939, Mieczysław was already in Minsk, continuing his musical studies at the local conservatory. On June 21, 1941, his graduation composition, "Symphonic Poem" (Chromatic Symphony), was performed. A day later, the Third Reich launched "Operation Barbarossa," the attack on the USSR.
It's likely that it was in Polesie, not Warsaw, that the Weinberg family met for the last time. The manuscript of one of Mieczysław's piano sonatas (Op. 5) is dated Luninets 1940, and musicologists and historians are seeking further confirmation of the Weinbergs' wartime fate by searching archival records relating to Mieczysław's early career in the USSR.
Mieczysław Weinberg returns to Warsaw
I wasn't surprised that he took up the topic of reminiscing about the Warsaw of his youth, about the pre-war streets, cafes, and restaurants he frequented and likely played in. – Polish diplomat Eugeniusz Mielcarek recalls his meeting with Mieczysław Weinberg – " He asked me what they looked like now, what was happening there. But most of the places Weinberg recalled from memory, with phenomenal precision and accuracy, were erased from the city map by the turmoil of war ." This conversation took place in late 1994, 14 months before the composer's death, and was recalled in Danuta Gwizdalanka's biography.
Warsaw, Trawniki, or Luninets? Perhaps it will never be possible to dispel all doubts about the wartime fate of Mieczysław Weinberg's family, as it is difficult to verify the memories and scraps of data preserved in archives and public memory. However, it is possible to look around Warsaw today and tell the composer what his city looks like today. The street named after Mieczysław Weinberg is a good place to begin such a story.
Agnieszka Kuś
