Sun 11/7 @ 7PM
Concert pianist Mona Golabek’s family story is a gripping one. Her mother Lisa Jura was also a noted concert pianist who passed her devotion to music to both her daughters. But her pathway there was strewn with tragedy.
Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna in 1924, She had piano lessons that nurtured her early talent for music — until the Nazis rolled into town. In 1939, her parents managed to get her on the Kindertransport, which evacuated Jewish children to Great Britain. (One of her two sisters was later evacuated by the same means and the other survived the war, but her parents died at Auschwitz.)
Her mother’s last words to her were “hang on to your music,” which she did while living in the Willesden lane orphanage in England and later as a student at the London Royal Academy of Music. She married another Holocaust survivor, Michel Golabek, in 1949.
Mona Golabek has carried on her mother’s legacy, not only with her music, but with the Hold On to Your Music Foundation and her book The Children of Willesden Lane. She also tours a performance of the same name, combining music and storytelling to tell a story of persistence, resilience and hope in the face of overwhelming odds.
That performance comes to the Maltz Performing Arts Center in University Circle, in a program sponsored by theMaltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation.
It’s free but you should register in advance here. Masks are required.
maltzmuseum.org/events/the-children-of-willesden-lane/