THE JAPS GAVE HER A PIANO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 338, 14 December 1945, Page 14

THE JAPS GAVE HER A PIANO

Lili Kraus In Prison In Java

ILI KRAUS, the celebrated Continental pianist who planned to visit New Zealand before the war, is now in Australia after spending two-and-a-half years as a prisoner of the Japanese in Java, and was to have made her first broadcast from Sydney this week on Tuesday, December 4. News of Lili Kraus has come to us in the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s weekly publicity bulletin, from which

we have taken the interview below. Her name will not be unknown to New Zealand listeners, who have heard some of her recordings of music by Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert, and it will soon become better known if it is true, as the ABC tells us, that she is coming here this month. Lili Kraus and her Austrian husband (Dr. Otto Mandl) were expelled from Italy in 1938 at the request of the Nazis, because they had refused to become German. They went to England, and in 1940 went to the Dutch East Indies, on the way to Australia and New Zealand. A Year in Prison-Camp And there they were caught by the Japanese invasion. Mme. Kraus was accused of underground activities, and held in the prison of the Japanese secret intelligence. Her husband begged to be substituted for her, so they imprisoned him as well. After being "investigated" for some days they were sent to seperate prison camps, and their two children were held in another. They spent a year in this way. Mme. Kraus and her fellow women prisoners had to wok hard. She had to draw 48 buckets of water daily from a well, clean the latrines, and help cook breakfast for 1,800 inmates, starting at 2.30 a.m. "At first there was enough rice and we sometimes had fruit and sugar," sh said, "but after six months we didn see a grain of sugar, we had no fruit, and not enough rice or bread After meals we were hungrier than when we had begun." After eight months of this Mme. Kraus had the good fortune to be supplied with a piano, because a Japanese commander who had been to her recitals in Tokyo in 1935 heard that she was in the camp. "T found that I could handle it with greater ease, and had acquired surprising physical strength from my manual labours," she said. "During the period without the instrument my attitude to music became much more profound and spiritual. When I got the piano I found there was no limit to memory, technique or vision." (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) She gave -her first concert for fellowprisoners in a shed with a single candle as the only light. That night, she and some of her audience wept at the sound of music. After a year the Japanese decided that Dr. Mandl and Lili Kraus were innocent, and reunited them and their children, For the rest of the time they lived in a one-car garage with rats and cockroaches, Lili Kraus was born in Budapest in 1908. She is essentially a classical pianist, interested in Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert, rather than the romantic and virtyoso composers. She began to play at six, and became a student at the Royal Academy in Budapest when she was eight. When she was 17, she had received the highest degrees.