The Putnam Museum in Davenport is hosting an event tonight featuring music played on fragile, decades-old violins that were once owned and played by Jewish musicians before and during the Holocaust.
Christina Kastell, the museum’s curator of history and anthropology, says the historic instruments will be played by members of the Quad City Symphony Youth Orchestra to open an exhibit called Violins of Hope in locations all across Iowa.
“We have three young students who are going to be playing trios tonight on the violins that have obviously Holocaust connections,” Kastell says. “So it’s very inspiring for them to get an opportunity to connect personally with these violins and the stories they represent.”
The 7 PM concert will include a special dance performance by Ballet Quad Cities, offering a rare opportunity to witness history brought to life through music, movement, and powerful storytelling.
“It is important that these violins live on because the Nazis tried to stifle their stories by killing their owners,” Kastell says. “These stories of these people who were murdered in the camps are so important that we remember so that we don’t continue to repeat these things in the future.”
Nearly 70 of the restored violins will be loaned to institutions across Iowa over the coming weeks, including the German American Heritage Center and Museum and the Figge Art Museum, both in Davenport.
“The Danville Museum at the Anne Frank Center down there, there’s one violin that has an Anne Frank connection, and that’s going to be there,” Kastell says. “And then the Jewish Federation of Des Moines is going to be sponsoring a number of violins in their community.”
The Violins of Hope plans several concerts across Iowa using the restored instruments with performances by symphony orchestras in Des Moines, Muscatine, the Quad Cities, and Sioux City.
The first Violins of Hope concert was performed in 2008 in Jerusalem. The violins have since been played in major cities in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Mexico, England, Romania, Poland and the United States.