JOSEPH SCHMIDT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 471, 2 July 1948, Page 5

JOSEPH SCHMIDT

Sir,-I was very interested to hear in the For My Lady programmes, one devoted to Joseph Schmidt. However, according to information which I have collected from time to time, some of the facts presented in the programme were not correct. May I be permitted to give them as I know them? Joseph Schmidt was not born in: Vienna (although he did live there), but in Cernowitz, or Cernauti in Buchovina province of Rumania. This province} before the 1914-18 war, belonged to Austria, but after the war it was given to Rumania. Joseph Schmidt, therefore,

became a Rumanian citizen. At first he studied to become an architect, but later gave it up in favour of a singing career. His visit to England to make films must have been in about 1934 or 1935, and not in 1937, because I saw his film My Song Goes Round the World here in New Zealand in 1936: Then in 1943, not 1946, I heard an announcement from Station 2GB Sydney to the effect that he had died from T.B. brought on as a result of sufferings in a Nazi concentration’ camp. A year or two later, I heard from the same station a few more details of the crime-he had been used for one of those dreadful Nazi experiments, and had been deliberately infected with T.B.! According to that announcement he died in a Swiss sanatorium, not a Labour camp. The sources of my other information are: an English pre-war film magazine; and ‘a man, now living in Sydney, who grew up with . Joseph Schmidt in Cernauti, living almost in the same street.

LISETTA

(Wairoa).