The Nazi memory expert

The Holocaust Revisited: Feeling the Pain

Diana Sevanian

Signal Staff Writer

1/29/2005

www.the-signal.com/News/ViewStory.asp?storyID=6345

[…]

In 1976, I married the son of a concentration-camp survivor — a non-Jewish, former Russian soldier. Through the years, I heard many of my father-in-law’s camp memories. I knew Ara Sevanian had been beaten and starved, hauled off semi-conscious for mass burial with a heap of lifeless Jews and others who’d shared his rickety horse-pulled cart.

I knew that the Nazi soldier driving that wagon recognized my classical-musician father-in-law from a concert he performed for Stalin before the war. Amazingly, that German guard decided instead to let Ara live and play for the troops.

Evidently the guy preferred Mahler to murder.

[…]

Diana Sevanian is a Signal staff writer. Her column represents her own views, and not necessarily those of The Signal.

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Note: It’s difficult to decide which is more fantastic — a Nazi soldier at a concert for Joseph Stalin in the USSR, or a concert-goer’s ability to remember the face of one musician out of an orchestra after many years and in utterly different circumstances.