The Piano War: A True Story of Love and Survival in World War II
by Graeme Friedman
(David Philip)
The remarkable love story of Bennie Hermer and Olda Mehr begins ordinarily enough — a young medical student meets a beautiful music student at a New Year’s Eve party — they are attracted, they date… But it is 1938 and across the seas, where Mehr is headed to take up a scholarship at London’s Royal Academy of Music, the guns of war are being primed. This will be no conventional affair.
In August 1939 Mehr and her immigrant Jewish parents, Ida and Joseph, left London to visit relatives in Eastern Europe. In a crazy denial of the impending war and the threat posed by Hitler, the extended family took an apparently idyllic holiday in the Carpathian Mountains and, through a series of misadventures and misunderstandings, the Mehrs found themselves trapped in Warsaw as the German forces marched into the city.
Caught up in a nightmare that included incarceration in a Gestapo prison, internment in the Warsaw ghetto, transportation to Berlin as enemy aliens billeted with local families and her father’s death in an internment camp, Mehr and her increasingly frail and bewildered mother somehow contrived to slip through the information net that would have identified them as Jews and joined the ranks of ”U-boats” — Jews posing as Gentiles — in their case, as Roman Catholics. So successful was their deception that Mehr was able to pursue her beloved music as organist in a Catholic church.
Meanwhile, Hermer, sent ”Up North” with the 17th Field Ambulance, was, along with many of his fellow South Africans, captured at Tobruk and transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp in Benghazi.
The couple seemed doomed to live out separate destinies but luck, courage and, in Hermer’s case, chutzpah, took over. Mehr and her mother, beneficiaries of a prisoner-swap and Hermer of his own ingenuity, were to end up in Cairo in the same week on a particular street at the same moment. The rest is the history of their lives together.
Graeme Friedman’s meticulous research offers a fund of fascinating insights and detail, though sometimes self-indulgent flights of description.