Yvette Assael-Lennon, musician at Auschwitz
MELVILLE, N.Y. - For Yvette Maria Assael-Lennon, music and the learning and teaching of it was not only a lifelong passion, but it also saved her from certain death in the horror of Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp.
As a teenager, she was one of thousands of Greek Jews captured by Nazis in World War II.
She was forced to play in a women's orchestra as her parents were marched into a gas chamber, said Ms. Assael-Lennon's daughter, Peggy Clores of Huntington.
Ms. Assael-Lennon, a Holocaust survivor, mother, musician, teacher, and homemaker, died at home Monday of complications from Alzheimer's disease. She was 81.
Her experiences have been depicted in at least one book and on screen in several cinematic and television productions, including "Playing for Time," Steven Spielberg's "Shoah," and HBO's "Bach in Auschwitz," which detailed the plight of the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, Clores said.
Ms. Assael-Lennon became a candidate for extermination when the orchestra no longer needed an accordionist, Clores said.
Ms. Assael-Lennon was 15 at the time and played accordion and piano.
Her sister, Lily, also a musician in the 40-member orchestra, convinced the Nazis that Yvette could play double bass, a massive instrument for the petite adolescent who had only an elementary grasp of the largest of string instruments.
In a last-ditch effort to save her life, she took lessons from a member of the men's orchestra, where her brother, Michel, played, and she played well enough for her captors to be spared, Clores said.
The life lessons that Ms. Assael-Lennon learned in the concentration camp she passed on to her two children, three grandchildren, and many others in venues where she was asked to speak of her experience as a Holocaust survivor, Clores said.
"Culture with classical music was very important to mother," Clores said, "but she had no idea that would be the very thing that would save their lives in the concentration camp."
Clores said Ms. Assael-Lennon's life was saved, literally through the might of the Allied forces who vanquished the Nazis, but figuratively by James Lennon, an Irishman who fought in the British Army and helped resettle Greek Jews like her in Salonika, Greece, her hometown.
There, in 1946 after the war, Lennon, the soldier on assignment, met Yvette Assael, the former captive and musician, as she performed in a local nightclub for Allied soldiers.
The couple married in Salonika in 1947.
"When my mother came back to Greece, she was despondent and lost," Clores said. "She really did not know if she wanted to continue living, and my aunt and uncle were extremely worried about her. She met my father and they fell in love, and he spent his entire life getting her through and helping her to live again."
The couple moved first to London and then to the United States, where Michel and Lily had relocated.
Besides her husband and daughter, Ms. Assael-Lennon leaves a son, David of Manhattan, and three grandchildren.
