Natalia Karp

Jul 13 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

THE bully wanted a bit of class at his birthday party so he told the beautiful young concert pianist to play him something – like he was ordering a dog to perform a trick.

But she knew if her tune did not please him, she would die.

Without hope, she played Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp, because it represented the sorrow growing in her heart.

He listened and when she was finished, said, “Sie soll leben (she shall live)”.

But Natalia Weissman asked him to spare her little sister Helena, a ballerina. Amon Goeth agreed because he had the power over life and death as commandant at the Plaszow concentration camp, Krakow.

It was the one featured in the film Schindler’s List with Ralph Fiennes cast as the merciless and murderous Goeth.

After her playing had satisfied him, Natalia, then 23, attended his party and saw the guests in white jackets eating and drinking.

Finally, Goeth stared at her: “Now, Sarah, play now,” he said.

Of course, Sarah wasn’t her name but she knew that to the Nazis all Jewish women were Sarahs. So she obeyed, as she did on several occasions in her 10 months there. Then she and Helena were sent to Auschwitz to die.

“My sister and I clung to each other. We scavenged for food. Every day we thought would be our last,” she said later. But they did survive.

Natalia was the second of four children born in Krakow to the businessman Isidor Weissman. After a classical training on the piano, she began giving concerts and, at 18, played Chopin’s E minor concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

By the time war broke out, she had given up playing and was married to Julius Tobler, a lawyer and pianist, but he was killed in bombing.

As the war advanced, she witnessed shootings and depravity and was trying to escape from the Tarnow ghetto when she and her sister were captured and sent to Plaszow, where she expected to be killed.

After the war, she met Josef Karp, who was posted to the Polish Embassy in London, where the couple settled and she resumed her career as a pianist, sometimes playing with a shell-pink handkerchief on the piano, reminding her that life was sometimes gentle and feminine.

Widowed in 1993, she had two daughters.

Natalia Karp, pianist; born February 27, 1911, died July 9, 2007.