Sarah Pring, mezzo-soprano
Chilingirian Quartet
Levon Chilingirian, violin
Ronald Birks, violin
Susie Mészáros, viola
Stephen Orton, cello
Andrew Brownell, piano
Letters from Lony tells the story of
Leonie (‘Lony’) Rabl (born
Fraenkel, Berlin in 1878) in her own words.
A German- Jewish exile from Nazism, she ran the Café de Paris in Amsterdam, writing when she could to her daughter and family, safe in England
Two further letters survive from after her deportation, on the journey that took her via Theresienstadt to Auschwitz.
Ronald Corp sets Lony’s letters as accompanied arioso, all the more moving for its understatement.
In 1942 the Café de Paris was declared one of the official Jewish meeting
places for the Beethovenstraat district, and for the moment Amsterdam’s Jews
carried on as best they could.
In her war diary An Interrupted Life, Etty Hillesum was full of praise
for the fried flounder she was served at Café de Paris: ‘Unforgettable as to
both price and quality’.
(An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941–43,
transl. Arnold J. Pomerans, Persephone Books, London, 1999)
The writer Harry Mulisch described in My Book of Hours how he
went there every week to drink a cup of ersatz coffee with his mother.
(Mijn Getijdenboek, Landshoff / De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, 1975)
At the end of August 1943 Lony Rabl was deported to Westerbork, a
transit camp near the German border.
On 23 February 1944, she sent a last letter from Westerbork to a contact in
Amsterdam, clearly intended to be passed on to family and friends. (It reached
her daughter and grandson in London only in September 1945.)
On 25 February, the Germans deported her from Westerbork to Terezín
(Theresienstadt), the garrison town. in occupied Czechoslovakia that was
used as a ghetto and has since become famous for the intellectual life that
flourished there.
As the German Reich crumbled under attack from east, west and the skies, on 12
October 1944 she was put on a transport from Theresienstadt to
Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was murdered two days later.