Symphony on Fire: A Story of Music and Spiritual Resistance during the Holocaust

Max Beker, Fania Durmashkin, and her sister, Henia, were accomplished musicians from notable musical families in pre-World War II Vilna. When the Holocaust destroyed their nurturing, loving families and came close to destroying them as well, music was their passport to survival and transcendence. This book shows how they shared their life-affirming music with the inmates of the Vilna Ghetto, concentration, labor and Nazi POW camps, the St. Ottilien and Landsberg DP Camps, where they were conducted by Leonard Bernstein, and, finally, with the new families they created in America.