When The Violin Weeps

By Glenn Starkey

"When the Violin Weeps" is based upon the disturbing true events of the Holocaust in World War II and the struggles to create the State of Israel. It is the story of appalling crimes against humanity.

Forcing Warsaw's massive Jewish population into an overcrowded ghetto to starve was Nazi Germany's first undertaking after invading Poland. Next came the merciless transports to the Treblinka extermination center. When Jacob Liebermann's wife Hanna is murdered in a gas chamber, the former Warsaw Philharmonic violinist fell into an abyss of insanity. But he keeps his promise to her to survive the Nazi atrocities at all costs.

Award winning author Glenn Starkey has written another gut-wrenching novel that tears at the hearts of readers and makes them feel every page.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667866130

Glenn Starkey

Glenn Starkey is a former U.S. Marine Corps Sergeant and Vietnam veteran. He worked for U.S. State Department Security, law enforcement in Texas, and retired from a global oil corporation. For the last six years, he has volunteered to help elementary students improve their reading skills. He lives with his family south of Houston, Texas.

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When The Violin Weeps

Copyright 2022 by Glenn Starkey

Cover design: Jake Starkey, 1820Marketing.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electrical or mechanical, including photography, recording, or by any information or retrieval system without written permission of the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN (print) 978-1-66786-612-3

ISBN (E-book) 978-1-66786-613-0

Books by Glenn Starkey

McKENNA

Released in 2022

BLACK SUN

Gold Medal 2016 Historical Fiction Award

—Military Writers Society of America

…It was Glenn Starkey’s ability to capture humanity at its worst and at its very best that touched me so deeply… Where some authors write a great story you can’t put down, Glenn Starkey weaves a richly colored tapestry and breathes life into every thread of the story. Every sentence, every paragraph, every description, and every character matters...

2016 Readers Favorite 5 Star Review—Readers Favorite.com

MICAH

Bronze Medal 2020 Historical Fiction Award

—Military Writers Society of America

SOLOMON’S MEN

… genuinely suspenseful… a cascade of power struggles… Exciting and unpredictable, Solomon’s Men is highly recommended as an original action/adventure thriller.

—The Midwest Book Review

Silver Medal 2012 Mystery/Thriller Award

—Military Writers Society of America

... one thing I can say with certainty is that if Glenn Starkey’s name is on a book, I’m reading it!

2017 Readers Favorite 5 Star Review—Readers Favorite.com

THE HONJO

Sequel to SOLOMON’S MEN

THE COUNCILMAN

Bronze Medal 2019 Mystery/Thriller Award—Joint Conference of MWSA and Southwestern Writers

THE DAGGERMAN

2022 Readers Favorite Five Star Review

— Readers Favorite.com

2020 Finalist in Religion Book Excellence Award

2020 Finalist in Religious/Historical Topshelf Book Awards

2020 Finalist in Christian/Religion IAN

— Independent Authors Network Year Awards

AMAZON MOON

Notable Indie Book of 2013 Award

—Shelf Unbound Magazine

Bronze Medal 2014 Thriller/Mystery Award

—Military Writers Society of America

… This would be one incredible action movie for sure! ‘Amazon Moon’ is deeply layered in emotions and themes of both revenge and redemption. The human elements of his characters are sharply focused but layered as well…

—W. H. McDonald Jr., American Authors Association

Amazon Moon is the sort of novel that grabs you by the throat on the first page and doesn’t let go until the last. It is an exciting story and, at the same time, something more. It is a fable about one man’s redemption, his rediscovery of innocence.

—Nicholas Guild – New York Times Best Selling Author

The Spartan Dagger, The Ironsmith, Blood Ties, The Assyrian, Blood Star…and more.

MR. CHARON

One of the evident appeals of Mr. Charon is Starkey’s descriptive prose. It gives vivid pictures of the surroundings and moves the story flawlessly, which also contributes to the plot’s deft execution. The classic good versus evil theme mixed with love, hate, and redemption makes Mr. Charon a great read.

2016 Readers Favorite 5 Star Review —Readers Favorite.Com

YEAR OF THE RAM

… it felt as if a hand had made its way out of the novel, gently grabbed me around the neck and pulled me into its story until such time as what was being told had come to an end. After accomplishing what it set out to do, the hand would then draw me out of the world I was in, pat my cheek, and disappear leaving me sitting there in wonder…

—Sandra Valente, Novel Review Café

THE COBRA AND SCARAB:

A NOVEL OF ANCIENT EGYPT

… Rich, vibrant, descriptive language. Characters with depth, imbued with loyalty, courage and strength or touched with madness for power and evincing raw brutality. Treachery, betrayal, intrigue at every turn…

— Amazon.com - Five Star Review

STEEL JUNGLE

…Terrific read. Talented writer. Recommending it to my friends. So easy to understand how this could happen. Scary…—Amazon.com–Five Star Review

INTO THE CAULDRON

Fictional sequel to THROUGH THE STORMS:

THE JOHN G. SLOVER DIARY

Silver Medal 2022 Historical Fiction Award

—Military Writers Society of America

2022 Finalist in Historical

—Book Excellence Award

Non-Fiction:

THROUGH THE STORMS: THE JOHN G. SLOVER DIARY

by Glenn Starkey for the Alvin Museum Society

…An important and valuable work…genuinely impressed with the completeness of the manuscript, as well as its organization…a work that, in my view, combines both the best of first-person observations and conventional historical narrative to understand Slover’s experiences as part of the larger sweep of American history during that period.

—Andrew W. Hall, author, historian, DeadConfederates.com - Civil War Blog, and regional Marine Archaeological Steward for the Texas Historical Commission

Caleb -

Mankind’s history does not change simply because a segment of society dislikes some portion and deletes it from books or modifies it to be politically correct for the day. We must learn history in truth, however good or bad, so we are not destined to repeat its transgressions. The mark of a man’s wisdom is the extent of his understanding of the world.

Jefe

What I want you to take away from my life story is just how important it is to defend your freedom at all costs. Experience has shown me that if you lose your freedom, you are condemned to fail….

Leon Schgrin — Holocaust Survivor

For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing….

Simon Wiesenthal

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed, and seven times sealed.... Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never….

Elie Wiesel — Night

Contents

Foreword

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Afterword

About The Author

Foreword

No one can state with certainty when the insanity began. Since the days of the Bible, the Jewish people have been ridiculed, vilified, and blamed in part for every societal problem confronting nations. Anti-Semitism passed from generation to generation, fueled by false perceptions, fear, hatred, and opportunity.

Upon Germany’s surrender in World War I, the 1919 Versailles Treaty punished the country for its aggression through a war-guilt clause that demanded heavy reparation payments, reduction of its military forces, and the loss of territories to neighboring countries.

Germany objected, believing the treaty was nothing more than a means to destroy them, their economy, and starve its people. The country fell into chaos, brimming with political unrest, and humiliation. The search began for its national identity and rebirth as a Nordic-Germanic race, Teutonic people—the Aryans.

The Völkisch nationalist movement, with its cry of ‘blood and soil’ and strong anti-Semitism, considered everyone but those of Aryan blood to be foreign people in their land. The Thule Society was a German occultist group created after World War I, taking its Greek name from a mythical land in the far north. The Society, along with Völkisch believers, supported and influenced the creation of the German Workers’ Party, that in time became the National Socialist German Workers Party—the Nazi Party.

Dietrich Eckart, a rich German playwright, newspaper publisher, Thule Society member, and avowed anti-Semite, was one of the founders of the German Workers’ Party. He believed a messiah was needed to rid Germany of the Jewish conspiracy and restore the country to its true Aryan roots. He found such a champion in Adolf Hitler, an Austrian born Bavarian soldier consumed with extreme prejudices, ruthlessness, and charismatic oration.

Mentoring Hitler in his public speaking skills, and writing his fiery anti-Semitic speeches, Eckart unleashed a cruel but refined monster that rose to dictatorial power. Hitler became the leader of the Nazi Party, vowing to fight the Versailles Treaty’s wrongdoing against Germany, and laid blame on the Jews for the nation’s economic downfall. He promised to return Germany to its pure bloodline by ridding it of Untermenschen—the sub-human Jews and others he deemed socially undesirable.

Butchers and madmen such as Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Eichmann, and more thronged to this messiah, anxious to do his murderous biddings at all costs. The Nazi Party grew, rose in power, spread its wings, and gave birth to the SS, the Schutzstaffel, and the Gestapo, the Geheime Staatspolizei.

Hitler wanted the total elimination of Jews and establishment of a Third Reich, an empire to rule for a thousand years. Methodical in his every step, by 1934 he had risen from the Führer of the Nazi Party to Chancellor of Germany, then assumed the title of Führer und Reichskanzler—the Leader and Chancellor of Germany. At the core of his aggressive plans, he wanted more living space for the German people, where only those of Aryan blood would exist. Under a furling swastika flag, he rearmed the German army stronger than before and released them to conquer neighboring lands and cleanse them of sub-humans.

Jews were barred from holding official government, university, and medical positions; their shops and businesses were boycotted, they were prohibited from attending schools; stripped of their German citizenship and forbidden from marrying an Aryan.

Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald concentration camps were opened to receive thousands of Jews, gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, lesbians, elderly, mentally ill, physically disabled, orphans, and others Hitler deemed unworthy to live. Registrations of the Jewish people and their properties began, then all Jewish-owned businesses were ordered to be given to Aryans.

German citizens were openly encouraged to beat and harass all Jews. The ‘Night of Broken Glass,’ the Kristallnacht, erupted across Nazi controlled lands, burning synagogues, smashing, and looting Jewish shops. Then 30,000 male Jews were gathered and sent to concentration camps.

In Hitler’s Reichstag speech, he proclaimed, "If war erupts, it will mean the Vernichtung, the extermination of European Jews." On September 1, 1939, after Czechoslovakia was invaded in March, Poland fell to Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg, a lightning attack. The insanity against the Jews magnified into a greater reign of terror.

The Auschwitz concentration camp was opened, but more extermination camps were needed, and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and Chelmno began their operations. All Jews in German-occupied Poland were ordered to wear an armband or a yellow Star of David displaying the word Jude.

In Warsaw, a ghetto was established to hold Polish-Jews and other sub-humans. The Nazi propaganda machine announced that it was a necessary action to protect the Aryan-Polish population from the brutalities and infections they had suffered for so long at the hands of the diseased, filthy Jews. But no Pole could recall such problems with the Jews.

And while the conditions worsened in the ghetto, the Treblinka II death camp was being built.

Chapter One

December 1941

General Government Area of Poland

Warsaw Ghetto

Shadows painted the surrounding buildings in wide swathes of grayish black, masking their aged bricks. Jacob Liebermann knew dusk would be within the hour and glanced about him to regain his bearing. Ogrodowa Street. Looking back, he could still see the ten feet high brick wall with its embedded broken glass and barbed wire atop it that ringed the ghetto, the Nazis’ death hole for Jews and others considered sub-human. For safety, he needed to move faster and be well south of Chlonda Street, the ghetto’s undeclared dividing line between the upper-middle class-richer Jew area and the one to the north for the abject poverty stricken. Once dark set in, German soldiers guarding the twelve gates let gangs of paid Polish troublemakers enter the 1.3 square mile ghetto to terrorize any of the 375,000 Jewish residents they found. But pogroms, the violence, happened as well to the other 50,000 non-Jewish inhabitants deported by the Germans from surrounding occupied lands.

All ghetto residents were fair game to be preyed upon. The Jewish Militia Police Service, the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst, created by the Germans to patrol, protect, and keep order in the ghetto, was of little use to safeguard residents. Criminals and sadistic men filled their ranks, enjoying forcing women to provide sexual favors, swindling food rations from families, taking pay offs from the black-market, and physically abusing the people with batons. To the Jews, they were worse than the Germans. They were collaborators without conscience.

The cold wind stung his face and cloth-wrapped hands as it funneled between buildings. He was thankful, though. The cold cleansed the constant stench of death and feces from the air. Pulling his tattered coat tighter about him, he breathed into cupped hands to warm them, and tucked his violin case deeper under his left arm. He increased his pace along the sidewalk, careful not to slip on ice that may lie beneath a fresh sprinkling of snow. At each building’s corner and alley, he slowed long enough to look for anyone lurking in the shadows before moving on again.

His gaze swept the area about him from ground level to the building rooftops. At times he caught sight of heads vanishing as they quickly lowered behind walls. He knew he was being watched. The underground kept track of everyone moving through the streets, especially strangers near their secret offices and weapons storage areas. Jacob walked on.

In doorways, emaciated families huddled to gain warmth, begging for money or the least morsel of food from passersby. On the sidewalk before them often laid their children, lice-ridden, dead from malnutrition and disease. Along the gutters, every fifty to sixty feet, was the corpse of a man, woman, or child, abandoned and stripped of anything useable. Orphaned children gazed at the empty bowls in their laps while gaunt, shrunken figures of men and women sat beside wheezing, coughing elderly, all spaced along the walkways with gnarled hands outstretched and lips trembling.

"Books. Do you want to buy a book? Five books for two zloty?"

"A wooden picture frame, sir? Ten books for two zloty, if you wish. They burn well in a fireplace."

The urgency and desperation in their voices was thick. But like others in the ghetto, Jacob learned to move past the beggars and prostitutes and walk around or step over the corpses as if they were invisible. Doing so tore at his soul and left his stomach in queasy knots, yet there was nothing he could do for them. He struggled enough to keep Hanna and himself alive. Where once he had accepted their childless marriage of fifteen years as his curse for not being ‘a good Jew,’ now he realized it was a blessing to not have extra mouths to feed. Food had become a valuable currency, greater than the Polish zloty which steadily devalued.

At times, survival in the ghetto required a blind eye and calloused heart. From a basement where secret church services were conducted, Rabbi Lewent read from the Torah about such things, warning against becoming too hardened and losing faith because of the trials that were upon them. Jews had undergone hardships since the days of Pharaohs. Through their inner strengths and faith, they would live through these days too. Though Jacob tried to maintain a semblance of religious conviction for Hanna’s sake, he believed God had deserted the Jews when the first formation of Luftwaffe fighter planes swept across Warsaw’s sky and the Wehrmacht marched in.

That day Hitler made the General Government Area in Poland. The Blue Police, Polnische Polizei im Generalgouvernement, were created from Poles and Polish speaking Ukrainians as state police for the General Government Area. This police force was overseen by high-ranking German officials, and the Jewish Militia reported to the Blues.

Distrusting their sworn enemy, the Soviet Union annexed the zone of land to its east, allowing the General Government Area to become a buffer between Germany and the Soviet Union. But Stalin’s distrust of Hitler was justified. After taking Poland, Hitler continued his intentions of ultimate domination. In May 1940, he conquered France. One year later, in June 1941, he broke the ten-year German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939 by launching Operation Barbarossa, a ruthless invasion to take the Soviet Union’s land. But the offensive had not been as simple as the fall of Poland. The Wehrmacht’s brutal campaign was now mired by high attrition, strategic blunders, harsh winter weather conditions, and a determined Soviet resistance.

To Jacob, the ghetto’s underground reports of a hundred-thousand German soldiers having died on the eastern front was joyous news. Any Nazi’s death was joyous to him. The reports were substantiated by crates of blood stained, bullet-riddled uniforms arriving daily at the ghetto’s uniform factory for the Jewish slave laborers to clean and repair for reissue to the Wehrmacht. But there were not enough dead Nazis to avenge their senseless massacres of innocent people. Three months ago, in only two days, the SS death squads of the Einsatzgruppen slaughtered 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine outside the Ukrainian capital city of Kiev.

Approaching an alley, Jacob heard muffled grunts and cautiously slowed. Snatch-and-run thefts were growing common, and he squeezed the violin case tighter beneath his left arm, ready to defend himself as best he could. He was a musician, not a fighter, but the case was too valuable to lose after all he had gone through today, and now, especially being within blocks of his apartment.

He walked out toward the street’s gutter to gain space away from the alley in the event a thief lunged at him, but he was still close. Garnering courage, he eased past the building’s corner and glanced along the alley. He halted, eyes flaring at the sight of a woman five feet away, bent forward with hands pressed against the brick wall for balance and to protect her head from being rammed into it. The tail of her long dark coat was raised and cast atop her back while a grubby, bearded man in filthy clothes gripped her naked hips and wildly thrust himself into her. Nearing completion, his guttural grunting grew louder.

The woman’s grimacing face was angled toward Jacob, but she kept her eyes squeezed shut. Black hair fell about her cheeks, swinging from the fierce jarring of her body. He recognized her as a resident in his building. Esther Birnbaum, a married friend of Hanna’s. She was thirty-five, the same age as them, but the last two years in the ghetto had carved lines of worry into her once appealing face. She looked much thinner now, more haggard. Yet everyone did with the Germans constantly cutting rations. Now the ghetto’s inhabitants were at less than eight-hundred calories a day. But hers was a look of despair, etched by fear of their unknown future. Her eyes opened and locked gazes with Jacob, blandly staring at him, unashamed of her actions.

The squalid man moaned in relief, stepped back from her, and shoved his manhood into his tattered trousers. He scratched his chest from the itch of lice, then drew two zloty bills from a pocket. After she stood upright and straightened her long coat back into place, he handed the money to her.

You can have her now. I’m through, the man said in a pitiless tone, glancing at Jacob before turning away.

Jacob watched him leave, then looked at Esther. She wearily folded the bills and eased them into a coat pocket. When she raised her face to Jacob, no emotion appeared.

Do you think I am a whore?

No… No. I… I was— Jacob stammered, lost for words. His face

flushed.

Pulling a stained cloth from a pocket, she reached under her dress and rubbed it between her legs. When finished, she glanced at the wet rag, scowled, and tossed it into the alley.

My children must be fed, and my husband needs medicine. Samuel is weak and sick from working in the labor groups at the pits where the Nazis execute our people. If he is too sick to dig and move the bodies as the Germans want, they will shoot him and say he refused to work. I must have money for medicine… Esther paused. Her brown eyes were wet, yet she did not cry. I have no pride anymore and will do anything for my family.

Jacob raised his right hand to silence her. It is not my place to judge you, Esther. These are horrible times. We must all do things that we do not like. He looked about the street. Come, it’s late. Let me walk you home. Neither of us should be on these streets after dark.

They walked in silence for several minutes along the sidewalk, moving around corpses that tomorrow would be tossed onto pushcarts by sanitation crews. The Germans decreed all Jewish funerals and religious ceremonies were prohibited. In their eyes, the only funeral a Jew deserved was being cast into the open pits for mass burials at the Jewish Cemetery.

"I don’t understand how your husband came to be in a labor group, especially one digging the death pits. He’s a member of the intelligentsias from the south. The Council avoids their selection and chooses workers from the northern ghetto because they do not know them."

The Jewish Council of the Warsaw ghetto, the Judenrät, was a Nazi puppet committee acting as a go-between for the Germans and the ghetto inhabitants. When Nazi decrees and demands came, the Council issued them, though everyone knew where they originated. In this manner, the Nazis could play their verbal acrobatics and tell the world it was always Jews doing wrong against their fellow Jews. Being on the Council meant slightly better living quarters in the ghetto, extra rations, and at times, profiting from payoffs and smuggling. But when the Nazis demanded twenty or thirty names of persons to be interrogated by the Gestapo at the Pawiak Prison, the consciences of the Council members came into play. One committee member had committed suicide rather than choose people to send to the executioner.

Esther looked at Jacob, never slowing her pace. Samuel learned of a council member skimming rations from families that desperately needed the food. When he confronted him, they argued, and tempers flared. Later, the man agreed to Samuel’s demand and said the families would receive their full portions, what little it was.

Shaking his head, Jacob frowned. And the Council member retaliated… the next day Samuel was conscripted to a slave labor group. Right?

Esther nodded. After three days in the pits, stripping clothes off the bodies and aligning them in rows and atop one another as the Nazis prefer to bury them in the mass graves, he became infested with lice and grew sick. I managed to get a bottle of powder from a ghetto policeman to sprinkle on Samuel to slow the infestation. It hasn’t helped. He’s worse. I believe he has typhus.

Eyebrows rising, Jacob glanced about the street and let his gaze drift to Esther. "One of the police gave you the powder for your husband?"

Esther hesitated before answering. Nothing is free in this ghetto except misery. I gave him what he wanted in exchange for the powder. She lowered her eyes to the sidewalk.

Clutching the violin case beneath his left arm, Jacob exhaled hard. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. He raised his eyes. They were on Sliska Street, approaching their building. We made it safely home.

Turning, Esther gently laid her right hand on his left arm to stop him.

Please, do not tell Hanna what you saw today. She’s my friend and doesn’t know. I don’t want her to think less of me.

Listening to the pleading tone in Esther’s voice hurt Jacob. Lips drawn into a thin, tight line, he nodded. His gaze drifted over the steps leading up into the building as he sought the right words.

"You’re a brave woman, Esther… A good wife and mother. This remains between us. But you must promise me to