Saul Dreier stands in the wings of the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage in Washington, D.C., waiting to be introduced. A short, wiry nonagenarian, he’s appearing there with his Holocaust Survivor Band in December 2015, a few days shy of the new year. It’s a prestigious venue for a musical group that, up to that point, had only existed for just over a year. Dreier is excited but not nervous. He has seen too much in his lifetime to be unnerved by a mere performance.
When the band is announced, the crowd greets it enthusiastically. Dreier, 90, and Reuwen “Ruby” Sosnowicz, 88, both Holocaust survivors, take the stage, dressed in matching red shirts, black vests and black trousers. Sosnowicz, the more reserved of the two, goes to his keyboard, barely acknowledging the crowd, while Dreier waves and blows a kiss before taking a seat behind his drum kit. They are joined by younger musicians, including Sosnowicz’s daughter Chana Rose, who sings and plays tambourine. A violinist, a guitar player, a horn player, a backup singer and another keyboard player-some the children of survivors as well-round out the band.
A steady beat, followed by the shimmy of a snare drum, introduces the first song, “Shalom Aleichem” (meaning “peace be with you”). An old Yiddish tune, it tells of angels that visit on Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. While some sing the song as a lullaby, Dreier and company play it fast and bouncy. They’re a klezmer band, combining traditional Jewish folk songs and the boisterous dance music of Eastern Europe with a heavy dose of improv thrown in. Think Yiddish jazz.
The audience nods along. Many mouth the words or hum the tune. Chances are, most know the song.
In stark contrast to the upbeat tune, haunting black-and-white images from the Holocaust flash on a large screen behind the band: prisoners being marched into the camps, bodies heaped on top of one another, families awaiting their inevitable fate.
The band segues into “Hava Nagila,” the wedding standard. Dreier leaps to his feet and demands of the audience, “Everyone, clap your hands!” They do. Caught up, Dreier remains vertical as he beats the drums. The photos are replaced by an illustration of dancing silhouettes under the words Enjoy Yourself.
When the song ends, Rose asks, “Are there any survivors or children of survivors of the Holocaust in the audience?” A man, a child of a survivor, stands and is warmly received.
It’s Sosnowicz’s turn to sing now, and he slows things down with the heartbreaking Yiddish ballad “Where Can I Go?” The lyrics describe the plight of the wandering Jew: “Tell me, where can I go?/ There’s no place I can see./ Where to go, where to go?/ Every door is closed for me.”
The rest of the song list includes old Yiddish tunes that Dreier and Sosnowicz grew up with, such as “Bei Mir Bistu Shein,” as well as American standards including “Those Were the Days” (my friend) and a rousing rendition of “To Life” (“to life, to life, l’chaim“) from Fiddler on the Roof.
The audience is loving every second of it. The band is loving every second of it. But no one in the hall is loving it more than Saul Dreier. Despite the nasty hand life dealt him, Dreier is naturally ebullient, blessed with an infectious smile and a zest for life on display with each nimble crack of his drums and in the way his playful eyes engage the adoring audience. The crowd has come to see the band he’s put together that honors fellow victims of the Holocaust. In an age of fading memories and Holocaust denialism, he sees it as his duty to make sure no one forgets. His goal, he says, , is “to beat antisemitism.”
POLAND IN 1925, the year Saul Dreier was born, was a very different place than what it would become. Growing up in Krakow, surrounded by friends, a loving family and the constant hum of music, life was “idyllic,” he says.
All that ended in the fall of 1939 when invading German troops marched into his hometown. They imprisoned his father, who was a musician and an officer in the Polish army. His mother and others were herded into boxcars and sent via train to the concentration camps.
He and his sister, Helena, moved in with their disabled grandmother. Under Nazi occupation, school was no longer an option for Jews. Instead, Dreier was put to work sorting through furniture, clothes and jewelry that the Nazis had taken from Jewish families.
In 1941, Dreier’s world was again upended after he watched soldiers drag his grandmother into the town square and shoot her dead. Weeks later, soldiers separated the siblings and marched Dreier, then 16, and other workers outside of town to the Plaszow labor camp, where he was given a new identity: 86540, which the Nazis tattooed on his forearm.
The camp commandant was Amon Goeth. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because he was depicted in the film Schindler’s List. Following the war, Goeth would be executed for crimes against humanity. Such crimes included drunkenly riding his white steed through the camp while shooting prisoners for sport. Other times, says Dreier, he fired at them from his balcony.
In the camp, Dreier was starved, humiliated and whipped. Death was a constant presence. What sustained him was music. In those precious moments when he wasn’t working 12-hour shifts at whatever job was forced on him, he could be found crammed into a singleroom barrack with some 50 other men, often tucked into bunks stacked three high. To keep up their spirits, a cantor would lead the men in singing traditional Jewish songs. One time, Dreier noticed they were out of sync. He found two metal spoons and kept the beat by clapping them together. That became his de facto job: the keeper of the beat. And he relished it.
“Singing helped me survive,” he says. “If you don’t eat but you work hard and you sing, you forget you haven’t got food.”
Over the next few years, Dreier, young and able-bodied, was moved from camp to camp, wherever workers were needed. One stop was at Oskar Schindler’s factory, repairing radiators for German fighters. Later, he spent time at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where more than 95,000 Jews were killed.
At an Austrian camp in Linz, an Allied bombing raid left Dreier’s hands, back and skull riddled with shrapnel. Wounded and unable to work, he grew alarmed. He’d heard that the Nazis were gassing and burning Jews in the concentration camps, and now, he says, he feared the worst, telling another wounded friend, “We are going to die here like everybody else.”
Days later, in early May 1945, with the Germans aware that the war was nearing its end, the prisoners were marched at gunpoint a few miles to a cave and ordered to walk in. Some complied. Others resisted and tried to flee. The soldiers opened fire. In the confusion, Dreier, who was near the back of the line, saw a chance to escape and took it. He ran.
Soon, he heard an explosion. Dynamite had blown up the cave filled with prisoners. He kept running until he stumbled upon more soldiers. But these were Americans.
After a brief recuperation, Dreier was sent to the Santa Maria di Bagni Displaced Persons Camp in Italy, where refugees were sheltered until they could return home or find someplace else to live.
Once again, music sustained him. One fortuitous day, a truck arrived and unloaded a piano and a drum kit. While others gravitated toward the piano, Dreier took to the drums. Adept at playing the spoons, he figured, How hard could it be? It was the first time he played on a proper drum kit. On weekend nights in the town hall, he would accompany the piano as locals and former prisoners alike danced.
“That,” he says, “is how I learned to play the drums.”
Santa Maria di Bagni gave him hope, but it was also the site of his greatest despair. He learned from other former prisoners that both his parents had died in the camps, as had his sister and two dozen extended family members. Dreier would not be returning home. He was one of those who needed to find someplace else to live.
IN 1949, SAUL DREIER, who had lost everything, began anew. He migrated to Brooklyn, New York, and got a factory job working as a welder. He met and married a fellow Holocaust survivor from Poland, Clara Brill, and the couple raised four children before moving to Florida in 1980.
By then, Dreier had stopped playing the drums. He was kept busy by work- he had started his own construction company and his family, which would eventually include eight grandchildren and three greatgrandchildren.
Then in 2014 he came across an article about a remarkable woman named Alice Herz-Sommer, a Holocaust survivor who had died that year at age 110. If, as it’s been said, a survivor’s best revenge against Hitler is to lead a long, fruitful life, she certainly exacted hers. Her story resonated with Dreier. While imprisoned in the camps, a concert pianist before the war, had drawn strength from playing music.
Dreier thought back on those spoons and that first drum kit. The article moved him to want to honor Herz-Sommer-and all the Jewish victims of the Nazis. And he knew how. It would be through his shared love of music.
“Music to me is life,” Dreier says. “If I play music, I’m alive.” Performing traditional Jewish songs before an audience, he reasoned, would be a way to keep the victims-not to mention Judaism itself-alive. To do so, he would need to form a band. But not just any band: a band of fellow survivors.
First, a reality check: Saul Dreier was 89 years old at the time. Retired 15 years. A stomach cancer survivor. Madness, right? That’s what his wife told him after he sprung his plan on her. That’s what his rabbi said too. But a man who has survived Amon Goeth isn’t easily dissuaded.
“My instinct told me that just on the contrary, because they told me I’m crazy, I’m gonna do it,” he says.
Within days, he returned home from the music store with a five-piece drum set and the resolve to form the Holocaust Survivor Band.
His first recruit was an accomplished keyboard player and accordion teacher, Ruby Sosnowicz, whom he met through a friend. Sosnowicz’s family had fled Poland soon after the Nazis invaded. In the mad dash to escape, he became separated from his parents and siblings at the Russian border. A sympathetic farmer took him in until the war’s end, when he made his way to Israel and then America. Unlike Dreier’s family, his family survived. The pair was soon joined by four younger musicians and an Israeli singer.
To spare Clara the sound of his rusty drumming skills, Dreier rented a room in a temple where the musicians could practice. There, the klezmer band rehearsed Jewish folk songs like the Israeli classic “BaShana HaBa’a,” an upbeat tune with a deceptively sad backstory-the song is a memorial to the lyricist’s brother, who was killed in battle in 1968. “You will yet see, you will yet see, how good it will be next year,” goes the song. Of course, there is no next year for the brother.
The next step was finding a venue to play. Dreier reached out to a nearby synagogue and offered to play a free concert, reasoning that if they charged, no one would show.
“But if I’m gonna play for free,” he says, “everybody show up.”
And 400 did. By their reaction, it was clear that Dreier was onto something. Even Clara was impressed, conceding, “Now I know you are a celebrity.”
The band, often featuring different musicians, would go on to perform across the United States and around the world-Israel, Germany, Brazil and Poland-in public libraries, colleges, community centers, malls. They played on a float parading down New York’s Fifth Avenue during the Israel Day Parade. Dreier even met President Joe Biden last year when he accompanied the Marine Corps Band at the White House during a Hanukkah celebration. Wherever they play, they are met with enthusiasm and warmth. Not because they’re a novelty act, but because they have a message to impart.
“People are so interested because Saul brings the history of his Holocaust experience,” says Mel Olman, who plays piano in the band. “They want to know.”
And they want to hear from a man who was marched into hell and survived. “Death called me several times in my life,” Dreier says on his website. “But I said no! I said to Death that as long as I’m alive I will live my life fully. I will inspire other people to share peace and wisdom around the world.”
To that end, Dreier started a nonprofit, Saul’s Generation Foundation (sauldreier.com/foundation), that connects older and younger generations by, among other things, promoting education about the Holocaust. That’s why Dreier travels to schools and universities to share his experiences. He says he hopes his story of resilience “serves as an inspiration for the world’s youth,” especially those who have suffered traumatic events.
DREIER’S WIFE, CLARA, passed away in 2016, and Sosnowicz has retired from the band. Still, Saul Dreier plays on. He recently performed in front of high school students in Florida.
Now, at age 99, he figures the various iterations of the Holocaust Survivor Band have played nearly 100 shows, each gig meaningful. But if he had to pick one that stood out, it would likely be a performance in 2016 when he and Sosnowicz returned to their native Poland for the first time since the war. They headlined a concert in Warsaw― held outside in the former ghetto where Nazis had confined over 400,000 Jews and sent nearly 300,000 to the Treblinka extermination camp.
Around 3,700 people-young and old, Jew and gentile-gathered in the street. The air was electric. Everyone wanted to meet Dreier and Sosnowicz, In a documentary, Saul and Ruby’s Holocaust Survivor Band, we see a Christian couple engage Dreier. The woman’s family members had hidden Jews from the Nazis at great peril to themselves. She and Dreier talk about peace and the horror of war, then they wrap each other in a heartfelt hug.
On stage, the emcee addresses the audience: “How many times will we have the chance to hear a Holocaust survivors’ band? To remember what they went through, to remember those that we lost, and to remember those incredible few who stayed with us? So when we hear the Holocaust Survivor Band play, we all have to take upon ourselves to be their witnesses and to take on their message of peace and love to the entire world.”
He then introduces the band, and Dreier and Sosnowicz mount the stairs to the stage, dressed in matching mint green shirts, black vests and black trousers. Dreier takes his seat behind his drum kit, while Sosnowicz straps on his accordion. And the show is on. The elderly are clapping, teenagers dancing, everyone swaying.
It’s daylight when they start, and nightfall when they take their final bow. In the documentary, Dreier can be heard yelling over ecstatic applause in a loud, unwavering voice, “Never forget. Never forget. Never forget! Never again. Never again!” Each phrase punctuated by an emphatic thrust of his drumsticks.