Nazi-Camp Survivor Thrilled by Fellow Victim’s Music

For Dasha Lewin, the memories came flooding back Wednesday night as she listened in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to the Boston Symphony Orchestra perform a work composed at the Nazi concentration camp Terezin--where she was imprisoned as a child.

Like Lewin, the work, Pavel Haas’ Study for String Orchestra, survived, although the composer did not.

“I am hearing it as if I am there,” said Lewin, who said her father died in Terezin, in Czechoslovakia. “The first part sounded like when we first arrived--we were happy, alive. In the second part, which is quiet and slow, I can hear the people leaving on trains to Auschwitz. Then the last part becomes fast again, like after the train was gone, we had to live again, to be happy, as if saying life must go on.”

Haas’ work, she found, was both inspiring and depressing, composed as if relating directly to the Terezin experience.

“It was an honor to attend this concert, to remember those who were not as fortunate, who did not survive and loved the music,” said Lewin, who had never before heard Haas’ short, one-movement work, written for four string sections.

Lewin, born Dasha Friedova in Prague, was 11 years old in 1942 when she was sent with her father, mother and oldest sister to Terezin. At the “model” camp she performed in a children’s choir.

“Music offered us a way to survive, to think about things other than death and depression,” said Lewin.

Lewin was forced to leave in December, 1943, for Auschwitz, accompanied by her mother and sister, who died in its gas chambers. From 1944 until 1945, Lewin was imprisoned in Hamburg, Hanover and Bergen-Belsen. After the war, Lewin returned to Prague and lived with family friends.

In 1962, she married and came to the United States, settling with her husband, Maury Lewin, in Los Angeles. Since 1963, she has been working with the Neutrogena company, where she is a vice president and treasurer. She also is active in local Czechoslovakian and Jewish cultural programs and plans to attend a reunion of Terezin survivors in October in Czechoslovakia.

“We are dying off, all of the survivors,” Lewin said, “and it is wonderful that this (performance) is happening in our lifetime.”