Ashes to Light ― A Holocaust Childhood to a Life in Music

Born into a Jewish family in Lvov, Poland in the early-1930s, Nelly Ben-Or was to experience, at a very young age, the trauma of the Holocaust. This narrative of her life's journey describes the miraculous survival of Nelly, her mother and her older sister. With help from family and friends, Nelly and her mother were smuggled out of the Ghetto in Lvov and escaped to Warsaw with false identity papers where they were under constant threat of discovery as Jews were sent to concentration camps and murdered. They then survived being taken on a train to Auschwitz, not, in fact, because they were Jews, but as citizens of Warsaw following the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis.

No less miraculous was how her innate musical talent survived and was even occasionally able to reveal itself, during these Holocaust years. After the war, they were reunited with Nelly's sister, who had remained in hiding in Lvov. After the end of the war, Nelly's musical talent was free to flourish. At first in Poland, where at the newly-established specialist Music High School in Katowice she gave her first public recitals at the age of thirteen and was awarded a special Chopin Scholarship and given a piano by the Polish government. Later, she and her mother moved to the recently-created State of Israel, where Nelly was able to complete her musical studies as a scholarship student at the Music Academy in Jerusalem. She also won first prize in a national Mozart competition, performed throughout the country including regularly for the radio in recitals and with the radio orchestra. Following her move to England she carried out a full concert career and also came into contact with the Alexander Technique for piano playing, which had a profound influence on her approach.

Today Nelly Ben-Or is internationally regarded as the leading exponent of the application of principles of the Alexander Technique to piano playing and is in great demand to share her experience in this field. She teaches in the keyboard department of London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama, runs Alexander Technique masterclasses and regularly gives talks about her Holocaust experience. This unique memoir is testimony to an extraordinary life and shows the real strength of the human condition when faced with adversity.

Nelly Ben-Or is a distinguished pianist and piano teacher. Born in Poland, she survived the Holocaust and now lives in London. She teaches in the keyboard department at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She has broadcast frequent recitals for the BBC, performed at major concert venues in the UK and in many countries overseas. In 1963 she qualified as a teacher of the Alexander Technique – the first professional pianist to do so. She is now internationally-recognised as a leading exponent of the technique. She regularly gives masterclasses at music conservatoires, universities and at her own twice-yearly international courses in London. She regularly gives talks about her Holocaust experience, especially around Holocaust Memorial Day.