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A Historic Record

In the past few days, I received delivery of a 115-year-old gramophone record.

Featuring two songs from the 1910 operetta Morgen Wieder Lustik, it is the only known original recording of music by my great-grandfather, the acclaimed German composer Heinz Lewin, who was murdered in the Holocaust.

I stumbled across the record online some weeks ago while researching the play I’m writing about Heinz, which shares the name of the operetta.

I plan to give it to my mother, Heinz' granddaughter, for her 80th birthday in November.

It was her interest in finding out about the grandfather she never knew that set me on this path, and she does not know of the record's existence, so hopefully she will be both touched and surprised.

That aside, it is timely that the record arrived when it did. It was 82 years ago this week, on 3rd September 1942, that Heinz was deported from the Septfonds labour camp to the Drancy transit camp.

Six days later, he died in Auschwitz.

I have put together a short video about the record, which I’m pleased to be able to share with you.

All I ask is you don’t tell my mother!

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