(Radio Iowa) – Nearly 200 eighth grade students heard the Sioux City Symphony perform “Violins of Hope” Wednesday on restored violins from Holocaust victims of World War Two. Jerry Weiner organized the event as part of tolerance week activities.
“By teaching Holocaust to the eighth graders, because that’s when they start reading the story of The Diary of Anne Frank, which is all true, they begin to realize how incredibly poor things happen in bullying, just in bullying in schools. The big shots, the guys that are pushing, guys or gals, pushing other people around. That’s got to stop. And the only way it can stop is that the majority says no more,” he says.
Weiner says each of the violins were tracked back to their owners, and each has a story. “Most of them were played in the death camps by people who were musicians, who were prisoners, and they played them, and then they were sent to their death,” Weiner says. All of the violins have been played by musicians all over the world, except for one that is kept without strings.
“Because when they opened it up, there was the Nazi swastika, Nazi Germany, under the regime of Adolf Hitler. And that was what he tried to do to turn the world into what he wanted it to be by destroying people,” Weiner says. The Sioux City Symphony played a free concert on the violins last night at the Orpheum Theatre for the public and the violins were played before that at the Holocaust Rails exhibit at the Sioux City Railroad Museum.
