Henry’s Song

Another night lost to searing back pain. Henry Rosmarin, 75, managed only three hours of sleep. How will he muster the breath for these kids this morning? The teenagers have burst into his life at a time in which he expects no joy, in which days are tracked by doctors’ appointments. He could not go back to their classroom and wheeze a few token bars from his harmonica--his instrument still. Four months earlier, he had told the students about a cold night in Nazi Germany, when he was their age. On that evening, during the Holocaust, a harmonica saved his life. On this spring morning, he has a piece that he must play for the kids, his means of passing on what he knows.

At Beverly Hills High School, he hugs their teacher, Julie Goler. She can feel his shoulder blades poking through his sport coat. At 5 feet, 4 inches, Henry weighs 117 pounds, down from 132. Square glasses overwhelm his sunken cheeks. Goler has to lean close to catch his words, which are murmured with a Polish accent. Five months ago, Henry was diagnosed with an unspecified cancer; his doctors can’t find the primary source. They are treating him with radiation, which kills his appetite, even for his wife’s chicken soup.

The kids met him only once before, in December, when he spoke to their ethnic literature class. He asked them to call him Henry. Two months later, the kids found out he was sick, and you would think that they didn’t have graduation and prom and their own futures to worry about. They don’t stop, these kids, with their cards, letters, calls: Can I mow your lawn? Wash your car? Clean your house?

One afternoon, Sharon Moradian, 18, dropped by his house in the San Fernando Valley. The kids had scribbled on a huge get-well card: You can’t give up now. . . You’ve survived worse. . . They also sent along a gift. Henry opened a box, lined with red velvet. He was too choked up to speak. The students had chipped in for a harmonica that one of the boys had engraved: “To our adopted Grandpa.” “I thought, ‘A harmonica saved his life once,’ ” Sharon says. “It got him through the war. Maybe it could again.”

Henry is the type of man who hugs everyone he sees, who still tears up when he tells the story of how he met his wife of 53 years, Jadzia. He glows with wonder at his luck in winning the affections of young people. “Kids I only knew for a moment! To have that kind of feeling!” In January, he wrote the class a thank-you note: “My Dear Students! Hope you don’t mind me addressing you as, ‘My’ students. . .”

The night before his return visit, Henry cut back on painkillers so he could look sharp for the kids. “I didn’t want to sadden their day,” he says. “I wanted to brighten their day.”

A Love of Music, With Profound Consequences

Henry was born Henryk Rozmaryn and raised an Orthodox Jew in the Polish town of Czeladz near the German border. His father, a coal miner, and his mother, a homemaker, listened to the operettas of Austrian composer Franz Lehar, the romantic compositions of Bizet and operas such as Puccini’s “Tosca” and “Madame Butterfly.” Henry begged his parents for a piano, but they could not afford one. Instead, when he was 9, they bought him a harmonica. On his own, he practiced the classical compositions he heard on his parents’ gramophone, such as the music of Schubert.

His boyhood ended in September 1939, when German troops invaded Poland, splitting up Henry’s family and cutting off his schooling in the eighth grade. Henry ended up at Dyhernfurth concentration camp in Germany. One night, he was roused from the barracks and summoned by the commandant’s orderly. At 17, Henry weighed 90 pounds. He shivered from fear, his clothes still wet from the day’s work in the snow, clearing roads.

The commandant, who heard that Henry played the harmonica, was in the mood for a command performance. From an easy chair, he tossed Henry his harmonica, a glass of schnapps or something in his other hand, a German shepherd by his side. “What should it be, commandant?” Henry ventured and then wanted to snatch the words back. What if the commandant requested something he didn’t know? Why hadn’t he launched into something simple, a German march or “Lili Marleen,” a song he knew the Germans loved? “Play something from Schubert, you miserable dog,” the commandant snapped. Schubert was difficult to play. Henry would try Schubert’s “Serenade” and pray that he would remember every note.

What were the odds, Henry marvels now, that the commandant would love the harmonica and love the same composer that Henry did? When Henry finished playing, the commandant said nothing. But he threw a loaf of bread at Henry and had him reassigned to kitchen duty. The assignment included playing dinner music in the guards’ mess hall. In his new job, Henry could sneak pieces of steak or a swallow of pudding. He put on weight that strengthened him for the days ahead.

Survival and the Start of a New Life

In the next two years, Henry endured two death marches, escaping from one of them and hiding with local farmers until he was liberated by Soviet troops in May 1945. He lost his parents in the Holocaust, but reunited with his older brother, Max, and childhood sweetheart, Jadzia, whom he married in 1947.

A year later, the three of them headed to the United States to build a new life. He and Jadzia raised two sons in Los Angeles; both live nearby. Henry turned to a career in sales, dabbling in everything from real estate to designer jeans. In spare moments, he spoke about the Holocaust at schools, temples and other places, and played a bit of harmonica.

Ten years ago, he retired and hooked up with Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, as a volunteer and part-time staff member in the research department. The Los Angeles-based foundation is chronicling the accounts of survivors and other eyewitnesses of the Holocaust in the largest undertaking of its kind.

Through the foundation, Henry took on more speaking engagements, and he found himself leaning on his harmonica again. “To really tell the story [with music],” he says, “you transform yourself in time. . . . Just by playing a little harmonica, I move [people] somehow. I found out I could do this--something I love most--to touch people. It became part of my life, especially when I could move a beast like the commandant.” Sometimes, people tell him of survivors who remember a whisper of harmonica music from the officers’ quarters, a stolen fragment of beauty. Henry likes to think that they heard him, that he played for the prisoners, too.

Henry’s harmonica is not the draw, suggests his friend, Ari Zev, the foundation’s executive director. “Every time you see the man, he just brings goodness and joy and wants to change the world from his experiences. . . . To him, this is the most meaningful thing in the world--that he can touch these students, and their reaction. . . . This means the world to him, given what he’s going through now.”

It’s impossible to articulate the chemistry between Henry and the kids, Goler says. “A lot of it is Henry’s spirit. He has been through these terrible life experiences, and, in the end, there’s still light in his eyes, a smile on his face. The music really brought it together. The way Henry plays--it doesn’t sound like a harmonica. It’s like a symphony.”

A Visit to His Newfound Grandchildren

On this morning, Henry waits with Zev in a hallway until class begins. Jadzia and the kids are settling down inside. How am I going to do this? Henry worries, his energy flagging. He asks Zev to please get him a Coke.

Inside the classroom, students who are not enrolled in Goler’s course sit on the floor. They heard about Henry and have asked to sit in. “You’re on, Henry,” someone calls. He refuses to shuffle up to the classroom podium like an old man. So he forces a bounce in his step that saps his breath. At the podium, he leans against a stool. Usually, he can only stand up for half an hour or so before he gets tired. Even with the microphone and a silent room, the kids strain to hear him.

He scans their faces and thanks them, again and again, for their friendship. “Who’s the guy who offered to wash my car? Oh, great! Michael, nice to see you.” He banters with the kids like the showman he is. “I never told you this before, but I don’t have any grandchildren, and now I’m blessed with, what, 35, 40 grandchildren?” Beat. “I can’t remember all of your birthdays, so don’t expect any gifts.” Ba-dump-bump.

In gentle, even tones, he talks more about the Holocaust. No, he says in response to a question, he doesn’t have many photos from his childhood. He has one picture of his mother but none of his father. These days, he cannot remember his dad’s face. In the front row, a girl in long braids and a turquoise T-shirt brushes away tears.

Forty-five minutes later, after taking the kids’ questions, Henry picks up his new harmonica. He has several harmonicas, but none make him feel the way he does when he picks up theirs.

He does not like to play Schubert’s “Serenade.” Since the war, Henry has played it only a couple of times at the request of Jewish groups who know his story. But now that the kids’ lives have twined with his, he wants to guide them back to that moment of time with him, to illuminate his message. (“We will all have our horrors to overcome. . . but to give up is actually easy. It takes more courage to fight on . . . even in those instances that seem hopeless to you.”)

The moment he zips off a few warmup scales on his harmonica, his illness falls away. In a moment, he will throw his body into a flamenco number, “Malaguena,” and a jazz piece, “St. Louis Blues.” The music gets his loafers tapping and the kids grinning. He will summon the breath for arpeggios, for sixteenth notes, for fluttering tremolos that make him sound like a mandolin player.

First, though: Schubert’s “Serenade.”

Five notes--he holds each with such authority that the music hangs in the air--and the kids are transported to Nazi Germany with him. The melody is beautiful, aching, and the kids see what the commandant saw.

The piece sent shivers down his spine, says Mike Perlmutter, 17, whose grandparents are Holocaust survivors. “I just thought, ‘Wow, this song was a life saver. It could have been my life on the line.’ . . . It’s a beautiful song, but the Holocaust killed that song for him. It kind of made me hate this song.”

Sharon, the girl who brought him the harmonica, says the piece “was scary. That was kind of freaky. It took us back to that place, and I know he doesn’t like playing it, but he still shared it with us, which means a lot.” She could have listened to him forever. “The second he played, his feet started tapping, and he just came alive. He totally changes when he plays the harmonica. That alone gives you hope. That alone is a connection. You see something he loves so much, and you get to be a part of it.”

After his rendezvous with the kids, Henry gets disheartening news. Next week, he must start chemotherapy. But he has a date to look forward to. He will see the kids again, God willing, on June 22, their graduation day.