Verstummte Stimmen

Barend Esriël Samuels was born to Jewish parents in Paramaribo, the capital of the then Dutch colony of Suriname. When he was two years old, the family moved to Amsterdam After completing training as a goldsmith and diamond cutter, Samuels studied flute with his father. He later continued his musical education with Ary van Leeuwen, Jacques de Jong, and J. M. S. Heuckeroth and obtained his first professional position with an orchestra in Amsterdam. He subsequently performed as a flutist in the orchestras of Arnhem, Groningen, and Utrecht.

In 1904 Samuels was appointed principal flutist of the Municipal Orchestra in Essen. Around this time, he appears to have changed his first name and thereafter performed under the name Bernard Samuels. Felix Mottl, general music director in Karlsruhe and a conductor at the Bayreuth Festival, took notice of the talented flutist and arranged for his engagement at Bayreuth. Samuels was subsequently a member of every Bayreuth Festival Orchestra between 1906 and 1911. From 1910 until probably 1919, he served as principal flutist at the Großherzogliches Hoftheater Schwerin in Schwerin. He later returned to the Netherlands, where he lived in Zeist, near Utrecht, with his wife, Sophia Samuels-Zendijk, and their two daughters, Reina Sophia and Celina Hester.

Following the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940, the Nazi racial laws were extended to the newly established Reich Commissariat of the Netherlands. In May of 1942, the deportation of Dutch Jews to concentration and extermination camps began. Samuels and his wife were first sent to the Westerbork transit camp and, in late summer of 1943, deported onward to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. On January 27, 1944, both were transferred to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Samuels died there on July 22, 1944. His wife Sophia died on April 2, 1945, just five weeks before the camp was liberated. Neither of their daughters survived Nazi persecution. Celina Hester, born in 1902, was murdered on April 16, 1943, at the Sobibor extermination camp. Reina Sophia, born in 1898, died at Auschwitz on October 22, 1943.

When the National Socialists came into power in 1933, it set off an unprecedented wave of expulsions from German opera and theater stages: For countless singers, actors, musicians, and members of the technical and stage staff, this meant the end of their careers. “Silenced Voices” makes the fates of those persecuted for “racial” or political reasons visible and audible.

An interactive map traces their life journeys: from major stages to the places of exclusion, exile, or murder. This creates a powerful connection between the past and the present: The biographies of those persecuted are narrated by ensemble members from some of Germany’s most important theaters, both past and present—the Hamburgische Staatsoper, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, the Semperoper, the Staatsschauspiel Dresden, and the Staatstheater Stuttgart.

The portal thus serves simultaneously as a tool for scientific research, a digital space for remembrance, and a resource for exploring local history.