Author Description

'The Violinist' tells the life story of Clare Galambos Winter. A talented violinist in Budapest when the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944, Klari, as she then was, went home to her family in Szombathely, expecting to be safer there. In July 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz. Weeks later, she was selected for slave labour in Germany and transported to the munitions factory at Allendorf. After liberation she returned to Hungary and in 1949 emigrated to New Zealand where she became a long-serving member of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and now lives in retirement. Based on interviews with CLare and others, and extensive research in New Zealand and overseas, this book is an important addition to the histories of both the Holocaust and postwar New Zealand culture, and a moving human document.