(Photo: Nicole Janssen)
After his arrest, trumpeter Pieter Dolk found himself at the Vught Concentration Camp in March 1943, along with other Dutch musicians such as Nico Richter, Marius Flothuis, Everard van Royen, and Piet van den Hurk. Giving concerts together for their fellow inmates, they forged lifelong friendships with each other.
(Photo: Nicole Janssen)
“One morning, all the musicians were ordered to step forward during roll-call. We were told that a camp orchestra was to be formed. The camp commander was a pompous fool who wanted a status symbol of all things! In the camp, there were a few musical instruments that had been stolen by the SS, mostly from deported Jews. The instruments we didn’t have had to be sent for from home. Piet van den Hurk, then conductor of the NCRV Orchestra, was appointed our conductor. The number of players and the combination of instruments varied because of the deportations to Westerbork and Germany and new prisoners arriving.
The repertoire we performed consisted of popular
classical pieces and salon music. [...] There were also performances in the
style of Johnny and
Jones, a popular radio singing duo from before the war. [...] There was
one parody about the train to the Lager [camp]. We rehearsed in the
mornings. In the afternoons, Everard van Royen and I worked as cleaners. We
had to scrub floors and scour the johns in the Krankenrevier [barracks
in which the sick were housed].
Regular Performances
We gave one performance a week in the music barracks, and we played for the
SS Kommandantur [commandants’ office] in the inner courtyard two or three
times. Sometimes members of the SS would come to the music barracks to
listen. Once it was raining, but we had to play outdoors anyway - string
instruments and all. Most of the performances were well attended. But once
there was practically no one in the hall. Roll was called early in the
morning, and people had to work hard all day long and didn’t always feel
like going to listen to the camp orchestra play in the evening on top of all
that. But this one particular time, the place was so empty that the
Oberscharführer [Senior Squad Leader] thought it was simply unacceptable.
The men were called together and told they had better get to the concert as
fast as they could. They were literally and figuratively beaten into the
hall.”
Orchestra Offers Temporary
Protection
“The orchestra became a fatigue party. There were daily rehearsals, but
performances were less frequent than they would have been in our n
Chamber music concert in Camp Vught, April 2, 1944 (see Documents); by
prisoner Arie Emens. In addition to Pieter Dolk, Hans Domisse (violin),
Marius Flothuis (piano), and Everard van Royen (flute) were a part of this
concert. That evening, Flothuis and van Royen premiered the flute sonata
that Flothuis had written in the camp, his Sonata da camera, op. 17 (composed
in 1943). ormal lives
outside the camp.” Members of the orchestra were exempt from participating
in the exhausting outdoor fatigues. The musicians were thus protected (at
least temporarily), even those who were Jewish. “It was a professional
orchestra made up of maybe twenty or twenty-five men. [...] Most of them
were Jewish. [...] There was a guitarist, a ‘Convict Jew’ called Max Groen,
one of the few Jews to survive the war. Gomez de Mesquita played the
recorder, or at least pretended to, since he didn’t know the first thing
about it. In an effort to protect them [by deferring their deportation], van
den Hurk would always say he needed the guitar and recorder in his
orchestra. [...] We were happy that we ran less risk as musicians.”
But after about four months, the orchestra was disbanded: “The conceited
camp commander Chmielewski was relieved of his position, and his successor
Grünewald thought an orchestra far too great a luxury for a concentration
camp. He dissolved it and had the musicians transferred again to ‘normal’
fatigue parties. Even after that, there was still a lot of music making, but
that was limited to us playing chamber music in our spare time. For the
prisoners, the chamber music evenings in the camp mainly meant one thing -
resting after a hard day’s work and getting the chance to forget their
misfortunes just for a moment.”
Richter, Flothuis, and van Royen: Friends for Life
A lifelong friendship developed between Pieter, composer/violonist Nico
Richter (1915-1945), composer Marius Flothuis (1914-2001), and composer
Everard van Royen (1913-1987). Their lives revolved around music. Nico
Richter had already established a good reputation as a musician in Amsterdam
before he was informed against and arrested. He was incarcerated at Vught
from January to mid-November 1943 where he took part in the camp orchestra
and at least one chamber music performance, given on August 1, 1943. Pieter
recalls him as being an “extraordinarily musical, pleasant, and warm-hearted
person.” After liberation, Nico Richter returned from Auschwitz critically
ill. Pieter had planned to visit him one last time on August 16 to say
goodbye. But it was too late: Richter died during the night of August 15,
1945.
Flothuis wrote a flute concerto (op. 19, composed in 1944) for van Royen at
Vught who premiered the work with the Netherlands Radio Chamber
Orchestra under composer Bertus van Lier
shortly after liberation. Also while incarcerated in the camp, he wrote
Aria for trumpet and piano (op. 18,
composed in 1944) for Pieter. After the war, Pieter lived for quite some
time in “Flot’s” house; Everard and his wife, harpsichordist Gusta
Goldschmidt (“Guusje”) lived nearby. Right up to the end of his life, Pieter
maintained close ties with them.
His experiences at Vught, as well as his personal friendship with Flothuis
and van Royen both in the camp and afterwards, left an indelible stamp on
Pieter’s musical and personal development.
Release and Freedom: From Amateur Trumpeter to Professional
Musician
After his release on April 12, 1944, Pieter went to Amsterdam. Music had
become an integral part of his life. Although only an amateur trumpeter
before his arrest, he decided to launch a career as a professional musician
after his release from Vught. He had started out playing popular music (with
Tom van der Stap and his Witte Raven orchestra, among others), but after
liberation, he focused on serious, classical, early, and contemporary music.
He took lessons with Marinus Komst (principal trumpeter with the
Concertgebouw Orchestra) and went on to play with the orchestra of De
Nederlandse Opera, the Residentie Orchestra, and the Groningse Orkest
Vereniging [Groningen Orchestral Society]. Pieter also became a
respected conductor of wind bands and was a pioneer of the Baroque trumpet
(“clarino”).
After the war, he continued to empathize with the Jewish people by, for
instance, learning to play the shofar, the ram’s horn. Working closely with
Chaim Storosum’s Collegium Musicum Judaicum, he eventually came to be one of
the only people in the world who could produce more than one note on the
instrument.
Arrest
According to a notice in a local newspaper, Pieter was arrested on December
16, 1942, for having given preferential treatment to Jews. In fact, he had
assisted Jewish musicians who had played a crucial role in his musical
development: his piano and music theory teacher Carel Drukker,
Jack and Clara de Vries (his
trumpet teacher Arend the Vries’s musically talented and well-known
children), and the well-known trumpet player and violinist Louis Bannet,
with whom Pieter had occasionally played gigs. During a trip to the latter’s
hiding place, Pieter was shadowed and then informed against.
Musical Roots
Pieter grew up in a musical family in the Dutch town of Zwijndrecht. His
father played folk songs on the harmonica, his mother enjoyed singing, an
older brother played the clarinet in a wind band, and one of his aunts had a
grammophone on which she most enjoyed playing operas. He chose the trumpet
as a boy after hearing the trumpeter with a small group of German refugee
musicians playing solo. He was given lessons first on the piccolo and flute,
and then on the trumpet after turning sixteen, when he was old enough to
play it. From the age of fourteen, he earned his living as an office and
shop assistant in a grocer’s. Although associated with small amateur
entertainment and jazz groups, his heart belonged to classical music. After
the composer Hugo de Groot put in a good word for him, Pieter was admitted
in 1938 to the Rotterdam Music Conservatory, where Willem Pijper was the
director. He was unable to complete his studies, however, because of the war.
Author: Annette de Klerk
The first two paragraphes are quotes of supplements about Dutch musiciens in
Vught and Theresienstadt to 'Muziek in Theresienstadt 1941-1945', Jo˛a Karas;
Pendragon Press, 1990; supplements byTheodore van Houten; Panta Rhei, 1995