Q&A: Krzysztof Chorzelski commissions Letters from Warsaw

Krzysztof, this is an extraordinary story and clearly very personal. Please can you fill us in on your mother’s background?

My mother was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw in October 1939 – less then two months after the Nazis marched into the city. When she was only a few weeks old my grandfather left Warsaw eastwards with the intention of setting up a new and safe place for his family near the Soviet border. His attempts were unsuccessful and led eventually to his arrest and exile in a gulag in the Ural mountains. My mother spent the first three years of her life in the Warsaw ghetto together with her mother and the two grandmothers. In the spring of 1943 my grandmother, by then fully aware of the hopelessness of their situation, gave her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter away to a Polish woman who sheltered the little girl in her home until she was denounced by the neighbours, her house raided by the Gestapo. A last minute bribe saved them. My mother was removed from their household and taken to a Catholic orphanage where she spent the rest of the war. She is the only one of all my relatives trapped in the ghetto who survived the Holocaust.

I have always been aware of the outlines of this story. I remember very well my first nanny – the very lady who saved my mother – by then a very close family friend.

The magnitude, however, of what happened to my mother and to so many others was well and truly beyond my grasp and comprehension until the day on which, prompted by a friend of mine, I decided to open a pile of letters I “inherited” after my mother’s death – something I had not had the courage to do for a whole decade.

What exactly are the Letters from Warsaw? What effect have they had upon you?

The letters were mostly by my grandmother – a young woman in her early thirties at the time. She wrote them to her sister who had fled to the Soviet Union together with her husband. They date from between May 1940 and June 1941 (as it turns out: on 22 June 1941 the outbreak of the Soviet – German war cut all postal correspondence between my family forever). These letters describe her everyday life in the ghetto, her joy at bringing up her little daughter, her mounting fear for their future, her anxiety for my grandfather’s safety, her frequent despair at having no news from him and her fading hope for reuniting with the rest of her family somewhere safe…

The discovery of these letters brought on a veritable earthquake inside me. It led me to piecing together a detailed account of my mother’s time in the ghetto and of the events after her escape. This inevitably made me see her life in a new light and definitely changed the way I view my own.

As a result of this discovery I was overcome with the sense of shock that, despite all that had happened, I came to this world and I am living a very full and rich life. Having shared this story with my dear friend the composer Joseph Phibbs, I decided spontaneously that the best way I could deal with all that I had learned about my family was simply to celebrate life. I knew of no better way of doing it than through music – my greatest passion – and I knew of no more suitable composer than Joe, whose music I had known and admired for years. There is a lyricism, clarity and tonal beauty to Joe’s style of composition that I identify with very strongly.

What is the piece like?

The piece for viola and piano, which Joe gave the title “Letters from Warsaw” is written in a very expressive style. It alternates lyrical passages, occasionally of a quasi-improvisatory nature with music of great rhythmic intensity. The motivic material is centred around a Yiddish lullaby chosen by Joe for this piece. It is entitled Shlof Mayn Feygele and originates from Poland. I like to think that my grandmother may have sang this beautiful and haunting melody to her little daughter…

Further performances are planned in March next year in Holland, in May in London and several in Poland later in the year. I’m hoping to record it in the near future.

First published in the Amati Magazine, 6 November 2015, as an Amati Q&A.