The tragic fate of a young Jewish children's orchestra in 1933

[Behind the Aegis]

A Jewish neighborhood in prewar Kovne (Kaunas), Lithuania Photo by Wikimedia Commons

It’s 1933. A group of young Jewish schoolchildren in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, is getting ready to perform a concert on the radio. It’s easy to imagine their excitement, knowing that their playing will be heard by listeners throughout the city and beyond.

Ordinarily, a concert by a children’s orchestra — an event which was written up in a Yiddish newspaper in Kovno that year — wouldn’t be worth singling out for comment. But this was no ordinary event. Of Kovno’s pre-Holocaust Jewish population of 35,000-40,000, only around 2,000 survived the war. These children, whose talent and enthusiasm leap vividly off the newspaper page, very likely didn’t live to become adults.

From a passing reference in the article, this seems to have been the first performance by Jewish children ever done for Kovno Radio. The 1930s were the “golden age” of radio, but 1933 was still relatively early — especially in Lithuania, where the first radio broadcast had taken place only in 1927. To these children, radio would have been thrillingly cutting-edge.

A kazoo orchestra
Most of the children were pupils at the “Harmonious Children’s World” kindergarten, and ranged from 4 to 6 years old. Several were a little older, though probably not more than 7 or 8. They performed in what the article calls a “noise orchestra” — likely made up of kazoos (or something similar), whistles, rattles and other simple percussion instruments. Among several named pieces, they played a version of a Haydn symphony. One child, presumably from the slightly older group, performed a trumpet solo. Whoever wrote the “review” said he was impressed by how well such tiny people handled their instruments, and how intuitively they seemed to understand the rhythm and structure of the music.

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