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Witold Baruch's letters from the Warsaw ghetto

Witold Hugo Baruch was a violinist. Born in 1889, he began his musical career before the First World War. He played the first violin in the orchestra of the Jewish theater of Abraham Izaak Kamiński in Warsaw. In the interwar period, he performed, among the others, in Kraków as a soloist (he also conducted), he was a concertmaster of the Kraków Symphonic orchestra of the Musicians' Union, founded by Bolesław Wallek-Walewski, he also played first violin in a chamber ensemble of the Jewish Music Society in Kraków, later he was the first violinist of the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra.

After the Warsaw ghetto was established by the Germans he stayed within its walls. He was a member of the Jewish Symphonic Orchestra. His wife, Zofia Dutkiewicz-Baruch, a Pole with no Jewish roots, lived in Grodzisk Mazowiecki. They called each other and sent letters. Six of them, written by Witold Baruch, have been preserved. Five were written in 1941: expressions of tenderness and longing intersect with very prosaic topics - descriptions of everyday life difficulties, diseases, everyday problems, stories about friends and commercial threads, as it is evident that the musician, apart from occasional musical assignments tried to survive in the ghetto among the others by circulating smoked meat products or clothes, and perhaps even smuggling. The sixth letter - a dramatic one – was written in the summer of 1942, when the Germans began mass deportations of the Warsaw ghetto population to Treblinka. It is known from the oral history account, made at the Polin Museum by Maciej Kotański, who was related to Zofia Dutkiewicz-Baruch, that the Dutkiewiczs got Witold Baruch out of the ghetto and hid him in Grodzisk Mazowiecki. He died there shortly after the war. His widow died in 1975.

Maciej Kotański handed over his letters to the museum, inspired by the 2018 "Memory binds us" concert organized by the Polin Museum on the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (see https://www.polin.pl/pl/wydarza) / connects-us-memory-ceremonial-concert-on-the-75th anniversary). "Ode to Joy" from Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was a part of the concert, it was selected because the musicians of the Jewish Symphony Orchestra and the 80-member Szir Choir were secretly preparing for its performance in 1942. The attempts were interrupted by the Great Liquidation Action, almost all the artists died in the Treblinka extermination camp, along with over 300,000 other people from the Warsaw ghetto.

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