The Cellist of Dachau

Music transcends war trauma in this extraordinary novel that opens in 1938 Vienna when 19-year-old Jewish cellist Otto Shalmik is arrested with his father and interred at Dachau concentration camp. To remain sane, Otto approaches every task — from shoveling sand to cleaning the latrine — as rhythmic in his imagination.
One day the Nazi Adjutant, Dieter Birchendorf, takes Otto to his home where he instructs him to play a coveted Stradivarius cello stolen from a Jewish family. Birchendorf’s pregnant wife Katja is a musician who is suffering idiopathic deafness, but he believes she will feel the vibrations as Otto plays. By 1943, Otto learns that his mother, sister and five-year-old niece have been imprisoned at Terezín and later transferred to Auschwitz.
Post-war, Otto travels to Toronto where he studies at the Royal Conservatory of Music and builds a career as a composer. In the 1994 present, he embraces a reclusive life in Big Sur, California where he agrees to be interviewed by Australian musicologist Rosa Little, who is hoping to secure his permission to become his biographer. Secrets connect the two strangers, ones that will change their lives.
An important, aching, artful Holocaust novel.

- The Toronto Star

A subtle novel that treads delicately around identity, values and life purpose.

- The Hackney Citizen

A wonderful story. A beautiful book about the unimaginable and what can grow from it.

- Marina Mahler, granddaughter of the composer and founder and president of the Mahler Foundation.

Looks squarely at the horrors of the 20th century, and old divisions that still fester…This is one powerful story that dares to hope, and shows the way to love.

- Bonnie Greer

There is much to explore, from the orchestras established in the camps to the special treatment sometimes accorded to to talented musicians and the impact the Nazis had on Europe’s rich musical culture. The parts of the novel set in Dachau, Buchenwald, Terezín and Auschwitz ring with a visceral truth, and real figures such as Herbert Zimmer, who established a secret orchestra at Dachau, and Hans Krása – composer of the children’s opera Brundibár get respectful supporting roles.

- The Financial Times