Alexander Stupel

Alexander (Shmaya) Stupel was a professional violinist from Vilna who, by the time of the German occupation of Kaunas in 1941, was among the most accomplished musicians in Lithuanian-Jewish cultural life. Born in 1900 into the extended Stupel family — a dynasty of klezmer and classical musicians centred on Vilna and Kaunas — he would go on to serve as concertmaster of the orchestra formed inside the Kovno ghetto in 1942, one of a small number of such ensembles that continued to rehearse and perform under Nazi occupation. His brother Boris played alongside him. Alexander did not survive the war; he was deported to Dachau, where he died in 1944. Boris survived both the ghetto and Dachau, and emigrated to Australia. Their story sits within a broader pattern in which Jewish musicians across occupied Europe struggled to maintain communal cultural life in conditions of extreme violence and mass murder.

A Family of Musicians

The Stupels were a prominent musical family based in the Vilna region of Lithuania. Their patriarch, Dmitri (Meir) Stupel (b. 1860), served as conductor of the Vilna Symphony Orchestra, and his wife Maria (Miriam) Antakolsky Stupel (b. 1870) was the daughter of a well-known Jewish sculptor. Their five children — Alexander (also known as Sasha or Shmaya, b. 1900), Gregory (Grisha), Boris (also known as Abraham or Abrasha), Mania, and Sonia (b. 1906) — most of whom trained in Germany, became professional musicians in their own right.

The family’s musical roots went deeper than this immediate generation. According to the musician and musicologist Joachim Stutschewsky, who regarded Vilna as one of the most important centres for klezmer music in Eastern Europe, the Stupels were the dominant klezmer and Yiddish theatre family in the Vilna area. He identified numerous members of the wider Stupel clan active in the region, including Leon Stupel (a violinist who later conducted operetta), Reuven (a violinist), Markus (a clarinettist), Bezalel (‘Zelke’) Stupel (a flautist who, according to Stutschewsky, “played all the operas by heart” and served as solo flautist at the Kaunas opera), Ossia (Yehoshua) Stupel (a violinist), and Vanya (Reuven) Stupel (a cellist who died in 1951 in Shanghai). A commercial recording from June 1911 on the Zonophone label, catalogued as X-2-100900, captures a wind band of the Municipal Theatre, Vilna — attributed to the Stupel orchestra — performing a piece titled “Good Day” (Dobriden).

After the Polish re-occupation of Vilna following World War I, the family relocated to Kaunas. Alexander, the eldest son, performed with the Kaunas Symphony Orchestra. His brother Gregory was a pianist who had studied in Leipzig and later played at the Jewish Theatre in Kaunas, which was run by his father-in-law Gabriel Lan. Boris also studied violin in Germany before returning to Kaunas. By the time war broke out, both Alexander and Boris were working in the city’s professional musical institutions alongside other Jewish musicians who would later find themselves confined to the ghetto.

Occupation, Murder, and the ‘Intellectuals Action’

Following the German occupation of Kaunas, the city’s Jewish population — including many of its professional musicians — was forced into a ghetto established at Vilijampolė (Slobodka). Most musicians brought their instruments with them. Alexander Stupel took his violin into the ghetto and, according to the Lithuanian musicologist Danutė Petrauskaitė, did not part with it until his death in Dachau. On 18 August 1941, soon after the ghetto was sealed, the Germans conducted what they called an ‘Intellectuals Action’: a targeted operation in which 534 of the ghetto’s most educated men were murdered. The killings made it immediately dangerous for musicians and other professionals to identify themselves as such. On 29 October 1941, a further 9,200 Jews were killed.

The Judenrat (Jewish council), led by Dr. Elkhanan Elkes, responded by incorporating the musicians into the Jewish ghetto police force, issuing them uniforms to give them a nominally ‘useful’ occupation. The Kovno ghetto police had been created in July 1941, even before the ghetto was sealed, initially drawing its members from Jewish veterans and sportsmen. Its stated function was to maintain order and enforce the council’s directives, though over time it took on additional responsibilities including the administration of the ghetto’s courts and, under German pressure, the organisation of forced labour details. Despite the compromised nature of some of these duties, most members of the force maintained a degree of moral independence: on 11 November 1942, every member signed a collective oath pledging to act in the interests of the Jewish community.

The Ghetto Orchestra, 1942–1943

By the summer of 1942, the mass killing operations had temporarily ceased and the ghetto entered what survivors would call its ‘Quiet Period.’ It was in this context that the conductor Michael Leo Hofmekler (1898–1965) proposed forming an orchestra. Elkes was initially hesitant, fearing that public concerts might be seen as an inappropriate display of levity in conditions of collective grief. Hofmekler argued that music would serve an emotional need and provide the inmates with moments of reduced tension. Elkes granted his approval. The formal guidelines for a police orchestra with a dedicated arts section were drawn up on 3 January 1942.

The ensemble that formed consisted of 35 instrumentalists and five vocalists, with Hofmekler as conductor and Alexander Stupel as concertmaster. Despite the description ‘symphony orchestra’ sometimes applied to it, the group comprised string and wind instruments only. The membership was not fixed: a police orchestra list dated 28 December 1942 names 23 players, but concert programmes show additional names, some of them likely drawn from violin students whom Alexander Stupel was teaching within the ghetto. Among those who performed was his brother Boris, also listed in the orchestra records as ‘Borisas Stupelis.’ Players ranged widely in age, from the thirteen-year-old violinist known as Jenkele to Morduch (Motel) Hofmekler, the conductor’s father and himself a cellist, who was 71. Performances were held at the ghetto’s Police House, which occupied the former Slobodka Yeshiva. Programming and logistics were overseen by Chaim Nachman Shapiro, the ghetto’s director of education and culture, a noted linguist and son of Kovno’s chief rabbi.

The first event, a concert for schoolchildren, was held on 28 June 1942; the audience was asked not to applaud, as a mark of respect for the dead. The first official public concert followed on 23 September 1942. It opened with a minute of silence. An eyewitness account by William Mishell, who was present, records what happened next: the conductor took the podium and opened with a work by Mendelssohn — a composer the Nazis had banned on account of his Jewish ancestry. Mishell wrote: “The tune was melancholic and before he had a chance to get even half-way through, everybody in the audience had tears in their eyes. Not only the audience had succumbed to emotion, but one by one even the musicians had tears filling their eyes and could not go on.” The conductor stopped, asked the audience to compose themselves, and then resumed the piece from the beginning. The programme closed with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. There was no applause throughout.

The first concert was controversial. Many ghetto residents considered it disrespectful to the memory of those who had been killed, and objected that the audience consisted primarily of the ghetto’s administrative and professional class. The poet Moshe Diskant, a ghetto resident, expressed the feeling in verse, imagining the hands of the martyred dead reaching from the walls of the yeshiva: “Get out of G-d’s house, / Of the holy yeshiva, / Where we have given up our lives with heart and love!” By the second concert, a week later, the atmosphere had shifted. The programme was adjusted to remove some of the more sombre pieces, and scattered applause broke out when a soloist completed Pablo de Sarasate’s Gypsy Airs. Concerts continued to be given once or twice a week, with additional performances on Jewish holidays including Purim and Chanukah.

The orchestra’s repertoire was broad, drawing on Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Spanish, Norwegian, French, Finnish, and Russian composers, alongside a substantial body of Jewish music. No concert was given without at least some Jewish content, and pieces composed by the ghetto musicians themselves — among them Hofmekler and Percy Haid — were performed regularly. German and Austrian music was forbidden to the ghetto performers, though the orchestra did on one occasion play Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 1. The concerts also attracted attendance from German officers, some of whom, according to one contemporary account, shook hands with the musicians afterwards and offered promises of privileges. Alexander Stupel performed as a soloist on at least one documented occasion: at a concert on 24 July 1943 marking the Zionist commemoration of the 20th and 21st days of the Hebrew month Tammuz, he played a Hebrew melody by the composer Joseph Achron. The 50th concert, on 27 June 1943, was marked with a celebratory poster decorated with a yellow star and the number 50. In total, 80 concerts were given. The last public performances took place in September 1943, after which the ghetto was reclassified as a concentration camp under SS administration, and the organised concert programme appears to have ceased.

The Police Action of 1944 and Deportation to Dachau

The arrangement that had protected the musicians — their formal membership of the ghetto police — proved double-edged. On 27 March 1944, German SS officers, reportedly seeking intelligence about the ghetto’s underground networks and hiding places, ordered all 140 members of the Jewish police to assemble. They were arrested and taken to the Ninth Fort, the killing site outside Kaunas that had been used throughout the occupation. Thirty-six officers, including the police commander Moshe Levin and his deputies Yehuda Zupovitz and Ika Grinberg, were executed. Others were tortured and then released. A handful of policemen who provided information about ghetto hideouts were subsequently organised into a new force operating directly under German command.

In an outcome that distinguished the musicians from their colleagues, only those incorporated into the police force on account of their musical roles were spared transfer to the Ninth Fort during this action. The protection was, however, temporary. Alexander Stupel survived the Police Action but was subsequently deported to Dachau, where he died in 1944. He was 44 years old. A Page of Testimony submitted to Yad Vashem in May 1999 by his nephew, Eliyahu Stupel — himself a survivor — records the basic facts of his death. When the ghetto was finally liquidated in July 1944, its buildings were burned, around 1,000 residents were killed on the spot, and a further 7,000 were deported to concentration camps, where most perished. Only 300 to 400 of the ghetto’s residents survived.

Boris Stupel also survived the ghetto and was sent to Dachau, but lived through the camp’s liberation. After the war he was reunited with his wife; they emigrated to Australia with their son. In Melbourne, Boris became musical director of the city’s main synagogue and took on pupils as a violin teacher. Biographical cuttings relating to his later life are held at the National Library of Australia.

Some of those who survived the camps gave a concert at St. Ottilien Monastery in Bavaria on 27 May 1945, conducted by Hofmekler, who had also survived Dachau. The programme included works by Grieg and Bizet, and closed with the Hebrew hymn ‘Hatikvah,’ sung by the whole audience. In 1946, musicians from the Kaunas ghetto orchestra performed at Nuremberg, where the International War Crimes Tribunal was in session.

A photograph preserved in the Yad Vashem archive (reference 75GO9) shows Alexander Stupel standing outdoors with his instrument case. A second photograph, now widely reproduced, shows members of the Kovno ghetto orchestra: Hofmekler stands at the left, Boris Stupel sits beside him, and Alexander stands at the upper right. Also visible is the thirteen-year-old Jenkele, playing violin at the back of the group.

Sources

1.  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘The Kovno Ghetto Orchestra’, USHMM Online Encyclopedia. Available at: www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php

2.  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Collections Search — Alexander (Shmaya) Stupel photograph record (pa11831). Available at: collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa11831

3.  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘Kovno’, USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. Available at: encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kovno

4.  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto. Washington, D.C.: USHMM, 1999.

5.  Jewish Virtual Library, ‘The Kovno Ghetto Orchestra’. Available at: jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-kovno-ghetto-orchestra

6.  Levitan, Eilat Gordin, ‘The Stupel Family’, in Kovno Stories. Available at: www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/kovno/kovno_pages/kovno_stories_stupel.html

7.  Lerner, Silvia, ‘A música e os músicos em tempos de intolerância: o holocausto’ [Music and musicians in times of intolerance: the Holocaust], 2023.

8.  Gradinskaite, Vilma, ‘Visual Art as a Supplementary Source’, in Art and the Holocaust, Jews’ Museum of Latvia, pp. 65–86. Available at: www.ebrejumuzejs.lv/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/art-and-the-holocaust-p65-86.pdf

9.  Mishell, William W., Kaddish for Kovno: Life and Death in a Lithuanian Ghetto 1941–1945. Chicago Review Press, 1988.

10.  Petrauskaitė, Danutė, ‘Music in the Kaunas Ghetto against the Background of Vilijampolė (Slabodka) History’, Klaipėda University / Academy of Arts. [Unpublished article supplied by the editors.]

11.  Tory, Avraham, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary. Harvard University Press, Cambridge/London, 1990.

12.  Stutschewsky, Joachim, cited in sleeve notes to Chekhov’s Band: Eastern European Klezmer Music from the EMI Archives 1908–1913 (EMI Records). [Source of Stupel family klezmer genealogy and Zonophone recording citation.]

13.  Yad Vashem, Page of Testimony for Aleksander Stupel, submitted 20 May 1999 by Eliyahu Stupel.

14.  National Library of Australia, Catalogue record 1645192: biographical cuttings on Boris Stupel, violinist and violin teacher. Available at: catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/1645192

15.  Echoes and Reflections, ‘Cultural and Spiritual Resistance’, Student Handout 06-01-09. Available at: echoesandreflections.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/06-01-09_StudentHandout_CulturalandSpiritualResistance.pdf

16.  Spector, Shmuel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume I Part A: ‘Kauen Main Camp’. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum / Indiana University Press.