Natalia Karp, a concert pianist who was spared from execution during the Holocaust after playing for the commandant of a German concentration camp, died July 9, the British media has reported. She was 96.
Ms. Karp arrived at the camp with her sister on Dec. 9, 1943, and expected to be shot when she was summoned to appear at the birthday party for Amon Goeth, the murderous commandant of the Plaszow work camp in Poland.
Instead, he commanded her to perform.
“I had not played since 1939, and my fingers were stiff,” Ms. Karp told The Independent of London in 2005. “The guests were all looking at me, and Goeth called me ‘Sarah’ – the Nazis called all Jewish women Sarah – and told me, ‘Play now.’
“I sat down and started to play Chopin’s Nocturne because I have always found it very sad,” Karp said.
When she finished the melancholy Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Goeth declared, “Sie soll leben” – she shall live.
She replied, “Not without my sister.”
Goeth complied.
After 10 months in the camp, Ms. Karp and her sister, Helena, were moved to Auschwitz, where they expected to die.
“We scavenged for any food we could find,” Ms. Karp told the London Evening Standard in 2005. “Every day we thought could be our last.”
Liberated the day after V-E Day in 1945, Ms. Karp and her sister made their way home to Krakow, Poland.
In 1946, on Polish radio, Ms. Karp gave her first major postwar performance.
“I decided to play the Tchaikovsky First Piano concerto,” she said. “I chose it because it is one of the hardest . . . and I wanted to show the Poles and Germans that they didn’t destroy me.”
