Keys to survival

The exhausted child, nearly frozen from the relentless winter wind sweeping across the Ukrainian plains, lowered herself to the snow to die.

Her older sister, Zhanna, pleaded with her to get up. When all her threats and hectoring failed to rouse the girl, she tried one last thing.

“You must get up,” Zhanna said as the setting sun made it feel even colder. “If you will not do it for me, then do it for Mama and Papa.”

After a few moments, Frina Arshanskaya rose to her feet, brushed the snow from her coat and continued with her sister toward an uncertain future. Before their horrifying ordeal ended, it would be Frina who would play the role of savior.

Before that moment arrived nearly five years later, the Jewish sisters would have to avoid the consuming flames of the Holocaust through daring subterfuge and their musical talents.

Ultimately their wartime journey would end on a cheery farm near Crozet, from where another remarkable journey of life would begin.

Until recently, most of what happened to the siblings between 1941, when Germany invaded Russia, and their liberation in the spring of 1945 stayed locked in their memories.

Now, with the publication of “Hiding in the Spotlight: A Musical Prodigy’s Story of Survival,” the extraordinary story is told.

The author, Greg Dawson, is the son of the book’s protagonist, Zhanna. He will be at New Dominion Bookshop at 12:15 p.m. Thursday to discuss and sign copies of the just-released book.

It took Dawson eight years to complete the often emotionally wrenching account of love’s ultimate triumph over the forces of hate and darkness.

For years he avoided taking on the book, but ultimately realized it was too important a story not to tell.

A mother’s untold stories

“Growing up, I was obviously aware that my mother came from Russia and was involved in the war, but she never talked about it,” Dawson said during a recent telephone interview from his Florida home.

“She later told me, ‘How can you tell children about such things? I thought it would be too cruel.’

“So I didn’t get the full overview of her experience in the Holocaust per se until I was about 30. I was working as a columnist for the Bloomington Herald Times in Indiana in 1978, when NBC aired a miniseries called ‘Holocaust.’

“It was a big deal back then, so I thought I would write a column about it. I called my mother to get a few details about her experience and she went into it. By the time it got to the end, I thought ‘Holy cow, this is incredible.’ ”

When Germany invaded Russia on June 22, 1941, Zhanna was 14 and Frina was 12. Despite their youth they already had become celebrated pianists.

Their father, a candy maker and enthusiastic violinist, admired the German people. He didn’t think he or his family had anything to fear from a race of people who had produced some of the world’s greatest musical composers.

Dmitri Arshansky’s faith in human nature couldn’t imagine something as evil as the Germans’ mobile killing teams called the Einsatzgruppen.

The murderous unit’s sole function was to kill Jews, and during a two-day period in late September 1941 at a place called Babi Yar, they murdered with gunfire 33,700 Jewish men, women and children.

It was December by the time the Nazis got to the Ukrainian town of Kharkov, where the Arshansky family lived. They, along with 16,000 other Jews, were rounded up and marched to an abandoned tractor factory about 12 miles away.

“One of the things that most shocked me was what the Germans did when they were marching the Jews out of Kharkov,” said Dawson, who now writes a consumer column for the Orlando Sentinel newspaper.

“There was a group of about 400 people made up of young children and the sick and elderly who wouldn’t be able to make the march.

“The Germans simply locked them in a synagogue with no heat and let them die. I’m not an atheist, but that sort of thing makes you stop and ponder the question about — where is God at times like that? And can it even be possible there is one?”

During the march to the factory, some frantic mothers pushed their babies and small children toward strangers lining the streets in the hope that a kindhearted soul would take them in.

If a guard saw the desperate act, the mother was shot on the spot.

The route of march soon was littered with corpses twisted into grotesque shapes by the freezing cold and agonies of death. But for young Zhanna, the most cutting wound was not created by steel or lead.

The deepest wounds

“The most painful thing was not the hunger, not the cold, not the fear,” said Mrs. Dawson, who now lives in Atlanta. “It was the way we were disgraced by the Germans.

“They were laughing at us while we marched, taking photographs. People think hunger, punishment, torture, bombs are the serious things.

“No. Persecution and humiliation are worse. For two weeks we were at that factory and only twice were we allowed to go to the pump to get water. No food. Not a crumb.

“But I tell you, the worst possible thing was the bathroom. That was a disgrace. Imagine old ladies, grandmothers, having to go to the bathroom and there’s no place to go. Can you imagine that?”

Unimaginable horrors became commonplace at the factory. People near death from starvation were thrown into a “living grave,” where their moans and convulsive shudders created a writhing nightmarish effect.

The Nazis’ endgame for this community of Ukrainian Jews was at a now-infamous killing ground called Drobitsky Yar. As Dawson explains in his book, “yar” means ravine or ditch in Russian.

These long depressions in the earth made them ideal for mass executions. On the day the Arshansky family was being marched to their deaths, Zhanna’s father bribed a guard with his watch to allow her to escape.

The last thing the father said to his daughter was, “I don’t care what you do, just live.”

Many years later she would remember the moment she jumped from the death march and how the eyes of the doomed people seemingly willed her to safety.

Mrs. Dawson’s parents and grandparents were murdered at Drobitsky Yar. Incredibly, Frina somehow escaped and managed to find her sister a short time later.

To this day the younger sister has never talked about how she escaped the mass killing. It only has been through her older sister that their amazing story has come to light.

Often with the help of people who are now honored by the state of Israel as Righteous Gentiles, the sisters were able to assume new identities.

Their piano-playing skills amazed people, and they ultimately ended up playing for German soldiers in Berlin and entertaining inmates in labor camps.

When the war ended, Larry Dawson, who owned the farm near Crozet and whose brother, David, would marry Zhanna, was put in charge of a camp for displaced refugees in Germany where the sisters ended up.

Aware of their musical talents, he first managed to get them to his farm, and ultimately they enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music with full scholarships.

Initially Zhanna wanted to return to Russia, but Frina flatly refused to go with her.

Because of this, Zhanna didn’t go, which probably saved her life.

It was only later that the sisters and the world discovered that Stalin considered any Russian who left the country during the war a traitor.

Most of those who returned were killed outright or died in Siberian prisons.

Before the sisters left for their new life in America, Larry Dawson arranged an extraordinary concert.

On the evening of April 13, 1946, Frina and Zhanna walked out onto a makeshift stage at the Landsberg Yiddish Center west of Munich.

The audience was largely made up of 1,200 Jewish survivors, many of whom were still gaunt from their time in the death camps.

For more than two hours the sisters played music by Liszt, Chopin, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff and Mendelssohn.

Midway through the concert Zhanna played her favorite piece — Chopin’s “Fantaisie-Impromptu.”

The last thing she had grabbed and hidden under her coat when the German soldiers had taken them from their home was the five pages of sheet music for the piece.

She carried the music near her heart throughout the war. It remains one of her most treasured possessions.

“I still start crying when I think of that concert,” said Mrs. Dawson, who went on to become a concert pianist and a teacher at Indiana University. “It was unbelievable.

“I always say the great composers whose music we played that evening were all there with us to celebrate.”

Greg Dawson will be discussion his book, “Hiding in the Spotlight: A Musical Prodigy’s Story of Survival,” at 12:15 p.m. on Thursday at New Dominion Bookshop.