Chapter 29
This chapter was by far the hardest to write and I agonized over it for months. What evidence there is, points to the fact that the marriage of my parents and our survival after the 1944 bombing of Königsberg depended on help from Wilhelm Poewe. His wife accompanied us briefly as we fled, and I saw her name on a worn document of arrival in Saxony near the place of her parents. Then she vanished and was forgotten forever and so was he.
It was only after an American conductor and scholar, Ray Robinson (1932–2015), sent me a copy of an article he had written mentioning Dr. Wilhelm Poewe that I became curious. At the time, Dr. Robinson was on sabbatical leave in Europe collecting data about the musical manuscripts of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–1847) for a book he intended to write on the topic. About Berlin, where Wilhelm had been a senior librarian at the Prussian State Library, Robinson told the following story:
While the Luftwaffe (the German air force) had been bombing London on nearly a daily basis beginning in 1939, the first attack of Berlin by British aircraft did not occur until 9 April 1941. The library itself was not damaged in this initial raid, but the bombs did destroy the Berlin State Opera, located only a few blocks east of the Prussian State Library on Unter den Linden. This worried Georg Schünemann, Head of the Music Division, and he suggested to Hugo Krüss, Director General of the Library, that the most valuable holdings should be evacuated. Krüss agreed and named Dr. Wilhelm Poewe as coordinator of the evacuation. A Nazi Party member, Poewe turned out to be an excellent organizer and the ideal choice for the assignment.
At the time, I too was preoccupied with finishing a book and forgot about this story. Only some years later when Irving and I were in Berlin, I said to him on a whim and as we were walking down Charlottenstraße toward Unter den Linden, “Let us check the Wilhelm Poewe story with a librarian at the Humboldt University.” That was indeed a bad idea, especially since I had forgotten what exactly Robinson had said.
