Sitting alone by the simple wooden coffin, silently reciting from the Book of Psalms, was the Shomer, the religious watchman and guardian of the spirit. I wondered, was one Shomer enough for such a spirit?
I first heard the name Louis Bannet while on a tour of the construction site of the Museum of Jewish Heritage/A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City. At the time, I was working for the advertising agency that was developing a campaign for the museum. Dr David Altshuler, the museum’s esteemed first director, was pointing to where several exhibits were to be displayed. As we gingerly walked past steel girders and exposed wires, he motioned towards a corner where a glass case would stand. Inside that case, he said, would be a trumpet that belonged to a man named Louis Bannet, once known as the Dutch Louis Armstrong. The idea of a trumpet and jazz in a Holocaust Museum seemed odd and strangely out of place, and I filed the story away in my memory.
About a year after the museum opened, I was asked to create several television commercials that would feature the great actress Meryl Streep and the violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman, who were both providing the voices for the museum’s audio tour. We decided that one commercial would feature Louis Bannet’s story, and we flew him to New York from his home in Toronto. When he arrived on the set, we knew we were in the presence of someone very special. He began performing immediately, as if the last fifty years were just a brief intermission, and, in a matter of moments, he had everyone under his spell. But soon the magic would come face to face with the tragic. We had planned to use Louis’ trumpet in the commercial, but the museum was concerned about its safety, so a production designer found an exact replica. Louis was brought to the second floor of the museum, the Holocaust floor. As you enter the room, you are greeted by a tiled wall of faces, gaunt with eyes sunk in their sockets. As Louis walked in, holding the trumpet, he met the gaze of the faces on the wall, the same people who may have heard his music as they were marched to the gas chambers. It was too much for him to bear. He fell to his knees and began to wail. Many in the crew of burly teamsters wept openly. Louis was helped up and, without missing a beat, said, ‘Let’s get to work.’ The next thing we knew, he was sitting on Meryl Streep’s lap.
During lunch he began to talk about some of his experiences before the war and in the camps. It seemed like he had one amazing story after another. It became quite clear that there was more to Louis Bannet’s life than a thirty-second commercial.
Historian and lecturer Dr Jud Newborn, who originally brought Louis’ trumpet to the museum, and accompanied him that day from his home in Toronto, characterized the day’s events this way: ‘The filming of that commercial was the fulfillment for him of his story the culmination of the whole process of personal grief, letting go, feeling it all in vain - and then finally moving into collective history and memory for real, after all those years, knowing he really had borne witness in museum form after all.’
Over the next two years, together with my partner, Dutch translator and dearest friend Jeroen Bours, I made several trips to Toronto, interviewing Louis in his small music-filled study. Entering the Bannet home was like walking into a piece of Delft pottery. Everywhere you looked, everywhere you turned, there was blue - even in the bathroom, which was stocked with blue towels, blue tissue paper and blue soap. Those visits with Louis and his beloved Flora were filled with tears and laughter, as well as ample portions of brown bread, herring and stroopwafels, the Dutch caramel cookies Louis loved so. These were some of the most special moments in my life. And after each remarkable episode, Louis would turn to Jeroen and me and say, ‘I tell you some stories, don’t I, boys?’
This book is a humble attempt to give those stories a welldeserved home.
Chapter 1: Young Louis
If you booked a room today on the second floor of the sprawling Hilton Hotel in Rotterdam, you’d be standing very close to the spot where Louis Bannet was born on 15 August 1911 at number 26
Kattendrecht. Today, this part of the city is a thriving business center. But in the early 1900s, it was a poor Jewish working-class neighborhood, the ‘Lower East Side’ of Rotterdam’, known as the Helmersstraat.
Louis Bannet, born Levi Bannet, was the youngest son of Leon and Leenjte Bannet. At one time there were eight Bannet children, but a sister and two brothers died before Louis was born. When Louis came into the world most of his older siblings had already left home, so it was just Louis and his older brother Isaac who remained with their parents in the small two-room apartment.
Leon Bannet, Louis’s father, was a mostly out-of-work fix-it man and an alcoholic, who at times could be abusive to his wife and children. Louis’s mother Leentje (pronounced Leen-cha) like many women in poor families, was the sturdy rock of the household. She earned some money as a seamstress, but also relied on the generosity of her brother, Abraham van Beuren, who managed a blanket warehouse in Rotterdam.
Louis Bannet’s first encounter with music took place when he was six years old. A neighbor in the building had a young son who practiced his violin at all hours of the day. Leentje would always find Louis sitting on the floor outside the apartment, ear pressed against the door. Unfortunately, although the boy practiced constantly, his lack of musical ability was painfully evident to everyone in the building.
One morning the boy ‘s father opened his door and found Louis sitting in his usual spot. He told Louis to wait, and walked back into his apartment. A moment later he returned, violin in hand. Without saying a word, he handed Louis the worn violin and tattered bow, smiled, and retreated behind the door. I assume the neighbors were quite happy, but not as happy as young Louis Bannet.
Call it a gift from God, call it a blessing, whatever it was, Louis possessed it, and by the time he was seven he had taught himself to play the violin.
Leentje Bannet loved to hear her son play. She knew he had a special talent, and longed for him to get professional training. Her husband had other thoughts. He believed music was a waste of time, and that money was better spent on other things, which for him meant alcohol. But every week, Leentje put away small amounts of money for Louis’ musical education in a glass jar she kept hidden in a kitchen closet.
One warm spring day Louis was practicing a Beethoven piece in his room. The window, which faced the busy street, was wide open. Leon Bloorman, a German Jew, was walking past on his way to work. The sound he heard stopped him in his tracks. He looked up to see where the music was coming from, but couldn’t see anything. He walked into the building and climbed the stairs, following the sound until he reached the Bannet apartment. He knocked on the door and was greeted by Leentje. He introduced himself and told her that he was a violin teacher at the Jewish Conservatory of Music. Leentje invited the young man inside to meet Louis. Bloorman, who was nearly forty years old, bent down and shook Louis’ hand. He was astonished at the sight of his violin: he couldn’t believe that such a beautiful tone could come from an instrument in such a terrible condition. He asked Louis to play for him, and again Louis played the Beethoven piece. When he had finished, Bloorman asked Leentje to bring Louis to the Conservatory the very next day to audition for the headmaster.
That night Louis practiced into the early morning hours. While he played, his mother sat in the kitchen worrying about how she would pay for her son’s tuition should he be accepted.
The next morning, Louis and his mother made the short journey to the Conservatory. Leon Bloorman, holding a violin case, was waiting at the door. He escorted them down the hall to the headmaster ‘s office. Once inside, he opened the violin case and asked Louis to take the violin in his hand. Louis lifted the instrument to his shoulder and began to pluck at the strings. He quickly placed it back in the case and reached for his own violin, still wrapped in the cloth case his mother had made. He told Bloorman that he would prefer to use his own instrument. The headmaster entered the room and Bloorman introduced him to Louis and his mother. The
