Yehuda Oppenheimer, 83, is a world-famous accordionist, composer, arranger and sheet-music publisher - he has been called the "Prophet of Israeli Accordion" - yet his teenage years hiding out in fear of the Nazis are virtually unknown to the public at large.  He told his story - in Hebrew, on video - to Arutz-7's Hizky Ezra. 

Born in Frankfurt in 1925 to a religious family, Yehuda and his parents lived in Germany until 1936.  "When it became very difficult to live there," he said, "we moved to Holland in 1937, giving us three years of vacation - until the Germans captured Holland in three days, and everything began again. I remember a German standing atop a tank and I came out to see and he yelled out, 'Here come the Jews, they're beginning to come out' - this was a sign that everything was starting all over again..."

"All the Jews were forced to move to Amsterdam. We were lucky, we had my grandmother's house - so my parents and I lived in this 13-room house... I was able to get a very desirable type of work, as a delivery boy for the Judenraat, between the Jews and the Gestapo, to bring papers and the like.  The office where I came to bring papers had a Dutchman who was a very big Nazi, and next to him was a German who was a bit less of a Nazi."

The Nazi Pulled Out a Gun

"One day after a couple of months, the Nazi suddenly pulled out a gun, pointed it at me, and said, 'Sign here that you agree willingly to go back to Germany.' I thought for a split second: 'What, in the middle of the day, in the middle of Amsterdam, he's going to shoot me? No way.'  So I just turned around and walked out - and as you see (smiling), he didn't shoot me.   But I realized that I had to disappear..."

Oppenheimer continued his story: "A friend of mine, a half-Jewess, tried to help me find a place; that very night, I left by train and her family came to get me - and thus began two years and eight months of (smiling wryly) a very different life than what I had been used to.  In the train, a German soldier came up to me and asked me how to get to a certain street; I was shivering in fear, but he didn't notice..."

A-7: "Some people ask today how it could be that the Jews didn't realize what was going on, that they just ignored the signs?"

Here Too We Live Like That, Right?

Oppenheimer:  "Yes, yes, I remember that every time there was a new law, everyone would say, 'OK, it won't be so terrible.'  Truly, no one believed that it would be as terrible as it really was.  'A yellow star? OK, a yellow star.  Not to leave our homes after 7 PM?  OK, we won't leave our homes after 7.'  No one thought about the future. It was probably a feeling of hope that didn't let them think that it could actually get much worse.  Here too we live like that, right? We say it won't be so bad."

Oppenheimer resumed his story: "So I was at my friend's house, then I went to the house of some elderly ladies, who just loved to tell all their friends, 'You know, we have Jews in our house...'  This was not good, of course, and I finally got to a place that I stayed for the next 32 months - a very religious Christian family of Calvinists. They knew us before, and one day the father said he would set me up somewhere - without telling the elderly women, of course, where I was going.  He took me to his house, and we built a little alcove on top, a place where I could go in and close it from within.  I hid there for the next 32 months; one time the Germans came to look, but they didn't find me.  The woman [of the house] was so scared by that search that she couldn't talk for two months; she just lost her voice... They later received Righteous Gentile recognition, posthumously; their son is still alive, though a bit confused..."

A7:  "Your story is just like that of Anne Frank..."

Oppenheimer:  "Exactly - except that I'm here now; that's the whole difference.... We used to have many arguments (smiling) about the Bible... But for 2 years and 8 months I did not go out of the house."

A7: "What did you do there for all that time?"

Oppenheimer: (smiling) "I also can't understand it some times. It was even without internet; if I had internet, it wouldn't have been so bad... I listened to the radio; 20 times a day I listened to BBC. And whenever there was another victory, I would say, 'Great, the war will be over in another week.' And that's how the time passed, for a year and then another one...  I wasn't allowed to go down to the family, because they had a store there and people could come in at any minute. Only on Sunday, when the store was closed, could I go down and eat with them; they would close the curtains, and that would be my weekly entertainment."

A7: "How did it actually end?"

Oppenheimer: "The way it ended - there were two dates.  First when the English arrived in southern Holland, but they couldn't advance to the north. So the south was free, but the north, where I was, was not.  Then even when it was finally over, we still waited another couple of days to make sure nothing would happen.  That was of course something very great, to see the sun for the first time."

Hard to Grasp that Chinese Olympics are Not Being Boycotted

Asked if he thinks such a thing like the Holocaust could happen to the Jewish people again, Oppenheimer said it is hard for him to see how the "good guys" continue not to learn from their mistakes: "In 1936, the entire world gathered in Berlin for the Olympics, with Hitler and everyone else - and just 3-4 years later, they were killing each other in war.  And now, the exact same thing is happening - the Olympics are to be in China [guilty of wanton murder of political opponents and human rights abuse - ed.], and yet no one is boycotting them.  It is hard to grasp this..."



Asked how he received his start in playing the accordion, he said he saw an accordion in a store window, "and I kept on bothering my parents to buy it for me, and finally - they were good parents - they did.  So I began playing; I never had a lesson in my life.  I learned piano, but not accordion." 

Once in Israel, he began playing the accordion in the army and for public gatherings: "There was no TV; this was how people got their entertainment.  I played in 170 kibbutzim and many concerts... I also played in the army, together with the first of the Banai entertainers, Yaakov Banai, and others - every day for two years... I had hundreds of students, and orchestras for students, and I published, with a friend named Yosef Pritch, all the accordion material in Israel."

"But today," he said wistfully, "the accordion has to wake up. The Russian immigrants are helping us in this regard, and the accordion seems to be coming back..." 

Ignoring the Nazi Years

Biographies of Oppenheimer on various accordion websites ignore his years of suffering in Holland. The sites refer to him as the "pioneer and ensign of the accordion in Israel" and Israel's "Prophet of the Accordion" - but totally skip over his years in hiding.  The above should serve to fill in the blanks.