Herbert Zipper does not always trust words. Language, he says, cannot speak to the extremes of human experience. Words cannot express the bitter lows and breathless highs the way sharps and flats cut through a jumble of emotion with piercing truth.
As a conductor and composer, Zipper learned the true power of music in the dim silence of a Nazi concentration camp, where he formed a secret orchestra and played illicit concerts to an audience of ravaged inmates. He carried it through his life to the scarred schools of inner-city Los Angeles, where, up until a year ago, he led concerts and taught music to children.
Now, at 92, he hangs on to the notes in his head as he fights lung cancer. Age and disease have made his face gaunt. Talking leaves him out of breath. But music still speaks to his resilient spirit. It comes to him while he's lying in bed or gazing at the blue sea below his Pacific Palisades home. And it soars with grand optimism when he watches the scores of birds descend on the feeders around his home. Because in Germany's Buchenwald camp, there were no birds.
Zipper was a talented Viennese musician and conductor, thriving in the elegant cultural scene, when the Nazis came marching into Austria in March 1938. Schooled for a life of privilege, slated to move in the circle of Vienna's artistic elite, he was thrust into a dark world where he had to struggle to hold on to the music that suffused his previous life.
At 7 one chilly morning, Zipper was one of many Austrian Jews rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps. He was sent to Dachau, a cold row of barracks in the countryside outside of Munich. On his first day, the SS commander welcomed the new inmates with these words: "In Dachau, everything is prohibited--even life. If it sometimes happens, then it is just by accident."
Composers from Vienna and musicians from the Munich Philharmonic were there, too. Slowly, Zipper and his friends began chipping away at the brutality of their imprisonment.
They hoarded pieces of spare wood, whittling them into roughly hewn violins and other instruments. Zipper told a sympathetic SS officer that he needed metal strings; two days later he found a pile of them under his pillow.
With 11 makeshift instruments--some no more than hollow boxes wrapped with taut strings--they formed a clandestine orchestra. On Sunday afternoons, in the dank coolness of an abandoned outhouse, the Dachau musicians strung together performances for the shattered men. The guards, intent on a Sunday of relaxation, loosened their vigilant watch over the prisoners on these afternoons. They were never caught.
