Bejarano was born in 1924 in Saarlouis, a German town on the border with France. She and her parents were initially not bothered by the rising anti-Semitism in Germany, because the state of Saarland came under French rule after the First World War. That changes when Saarland is reunited with Germany in 1935 and has to deal with the race laws of the Hitler regime.
Many Jewish residents of Saarland flee abroad. Her father did not think that was necessary, Bejarano told the Saarland broadcaster SR last year. “My father had fought for Germany in World War I and had become disabled as a result. He believed that nothing would happen to him and his family.”
Auschwitz
He was wrong. In 1941 he and his wife were murdered by the Nazis. A year later, Esther’s sister Ruth faced the same fate. Esther was first forced to do forced labour, but was transferred to the Auschwitz extermination camp in 1943. By sheer coincidence she got a place as an accordionist in the so-called girls’ orchestra.
“Every time a train of prisoners arrived, we had to stand at the gate and play,” Bejarano told SR. “Those people probably thought: where music is made, it can’t be very bad.” But after that, most of the prisoners went straight to the gas chambers.
Ravensbrück
After six months of Auschwitz, Bejarano was transferred to the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp. When the Russians approached in 1945, the Nazis forced the prisoners to walk to areas further from the front. During these ‘death marches’ she managed to escape with three others and into territory liberated by the Americans.
After the war, Bejarano moved to Israel, where she met her husband. They married and had two children. Her husband served in the Israel Defense Forces during the 1956 Suez Crisis.
Partly because of that experience, it decided to leave Israel. In 1960, Bejarano settled in Hamburg with her family. In the early 1980s, she founded a music group with her daughter and son that performed Jewish and anti-fascist songs. In 2012, she released a CD with the hip-hop band Microphone Mafia from Cologne.
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