Someone sent me this video today:
Violin maker Amnon Weinstein painstakingly collected and restored violins that were used by Holocaust victims, and here they're played at a 2008 concert in Jerusalem; one of the victims was a 12 year old boy who smuggled explosives in his violin case - these explosives were used against German troops in Eastern Europe.
Hatikva ("The Hope") is the Israeli national anthem. The melody is based on a Renaissance era Italian song, La Mantovana - from the Renaissance onwards this melody appeared in a number of different folk songs across Europe from Scotland to Poland; it was also used by the 19th-century composer Smetana in his piece, Vltava or Die Moldau - one of a group of several symphonic poems he wrote in tribute to Bohemia, his homeland (the Vltava is a river that runs through Prague).
Think of the music played on these violins prior to the Holocaust - klezmer and other folk music for instance; their owners might have once played the melody of La Mantovana on them in one form or another (or if they were classical musicians, maybe they performed Vltava in a concert hall). In any case these instruments, which were in pieces (at least one of them found buried in a concentration camp) are whole again, a legacy from the people who owned them and made music on them.
