Instruments of healing
Galambos was liberated while being forcibly marched towards Bergen-Belsen and after the war returned home to find her house had been destroyed and all her immediate family dead. Of the 4,800 Jewish residents of Szombathely fewer than 100 survived the war.
“None of my immediate family were left alive and apart from a cousin and an aunt I had no home and no means of support,” Galambos says. “Only my music and I survived.”
Before the German occupation Galambos had been a violin student in Budapest and on her return to Szombathely she was desperate to play again.
“A kind American general put out a call to find me a violin and playing it made my dire situation marginally better.”
In 1948 Galambos and her aunt left Hungary for New Zealand. She joined the fledging national orchestra where she played for 33 years, retiring in 1983 as first violinist. Her story has recently been published by VUW Press in The Violinist by Sarah Gaitanos. After her retirement to Wellington Galambos donated her two fine violins (a 19th century Hungarian instrument and an 18th century Italian) to the New Zealand School of Music for the use of promising students.
Those instruments will be played in the NZSM orchestra’s concert Remembrance, marking the 70th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre in Kiev. The concert features Boris Pigovat’s work Requiem: The Holocaust, written in commemoration of the event in which 34,000 Jews were murdered by Nazi forces. As well as the Pigovat Requiem the programme includes Scheloma for orchestra and cello by Ernest Bloch, and two New Zealand works, Anthony Ritchie’s Remember Parihaka and NZSM lecturer Professor John Psathas’s Luminous. Ritchie’s work was inspired by the conflict between Taranaki Maori and British soldiers in the 1800s, while Luminous was written in memory of a friend who experienced cultural dislocation after immigrating to New Zealand from China.
NZSM director Elizabeth Hudson says: “Music, as a response to conflict and trauma, has the power to express what cannot easily be put into words. The four works in this concert were created in response to four very different situations from the past, but through their performance we will bring them into our present, and remember and honour the victims.”
Remembrance, New Zealand School of Music Orchestra, Wellington Town Hall, 7.30pm, September 29.










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