The Violin of Auschwitz
A Novel
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The Violin of Auschwitz
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Narrated by:
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David Colacci
About this listen
In the winter of 1991, at a concert in Krakow, an older woman with a marvelously pitched violin meets a fellow musician who is instantly captivated by her instrument. When he asks her how she obtained it, she reveals the remarkable story behind its origin....
Imprisoned at Auschwitz, the notorious concentration camp, Daniel feels his humanity slipping away. Treasured memories of the young woman he loved and the prayers that once lingered on his lips become hazier with each passing day. Then a visit from a mysterious stranger changes everything, as Daniel’s former identity as a crafter of fine violins is revealed to all. The camp’s two most dangerous men use this information to make a cruel wager: If Daniel can build a successful violin within a certain number of days, the Kommandant wins a case of the finest burgundy. If not, the camp doctor, a torturer, gets hold of Daniel. And so, battling exhaustion, Daniel tries to recapture his lost art, knowing all too well the likely cost of failure.
Written with lyrical simplicity and haunting beauty - and interspersed with chilling, actual Nazi documentation - The Violin of Auschwitz is more than just a novel: It is a testament to the strength of the human spirit and the power of beauty, art, and hope to triumph over the darkest adversity.
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 36
This is Michael Krupa’s story of how in 1939 he escaped the German invasion of Poland only to be captured by the Red Army, accused of espionage and interrogated in the notorious Lubianka prison. He was then sent to the infamous Pechora Gulag, where most inmates died of overwork and starvation within a year. Amazingly, Kupra then escaped and made the gruelling journey from Siberia to Afghanistan. This is a remarkable true story of survival and also gives a chilling insight into the brutality of Stalinist Russia.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Harrowing Story of Survival
- By Curatina on 11-23-11
By: Michael Krupa
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The Stories of Eva Luna
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Pena
- Length: 2 hrs and 44 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 104
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 72
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Story4 out of 5 stars 71
Immerse yourself in a world of love, vengeance, compassion, and irony with the evocative stories of Eva Luna. Author Isabel Allende introduced this well-loved character to audiences in her earlier novel, Eva Luna. Listen to Allende talk about the role of writing in her life in Giving Birth, Finding Form. This program also features Alice Walker and Jean Shinoda Bolen.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Better some Allende than no Allende
- By Perschon on 12-04-14
By: Isabel Allende
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The Accusation
- Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea
- By: Bandi
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 70
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 64
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Story4 out of 5 stars 63
The Accusation is a deeply moving and eye-opening work of fiction that paints a powerful portrait of life under the North Korean regime. Set during the period of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il's leadership, the seven stories that make up The Accusation give voice to people living under this most bizarre and horrifying of dictatorships. The characters of these compelling stories come from a wide variety of backgrounds.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Incredibly powerful
- By Margaret on 09-30-19
By: Bandi
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In the First Circle
- By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harry T. Willets - translator
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 31 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 564
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 493
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 491
Moscow, Christmas Eve, 1949. The Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy by a Russian diplomat who promises to deliver secrets about the nascent Soviet Atomic Bomb program. On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin's repressive state - or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps, and almost certain death.
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5 out of 5 stars
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One of the five finest novels written in the 20th Century
- By Ellis D Vener on 04-08-19
By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others
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Story of a Secret State
- Penguin Modern Classics
- By: Jan Karski
- Narrated by: Janusz Guttner
- Length: 18 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 94
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 84
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Story5 out of 5 stars 82
I do not pretend to have given an exhaustive picture of the Polish Underground, its organisation and its activities. Because of our methods, I believe that there is no one today who could give an all-embracing recital...This book is a purely personal story, my story. Jan Karski's Second World War memoir is a heroic act of witness: the courageous testimony of a man who risked everything for his country. First published in 1944, the book became an instant bestseller in the US while the war still raged in Europe.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Outstanding
- By David on 10-20-11
By: Jan Karski
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After the Roundup
- Escape and Survival in Hitler’s France
- By: Joseph Weismann
- Narrated by: J. Clark Allison
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 39
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 37
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Story5 out of 5 stars 36
On the nights of July 16 and 17, 1942, French police rounded up 11-year-old Joseph Weismann, his family, and 13,000 other Jews. After being held for five days in appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d'Hiver stadium, Joseph and his family were transported by cattle car to the Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp and brutally separated. A thousand children were left behind to wait for a later train. The French guards told the children that they would soon be reunited with their parents, but Joseph and his new friend, Joe Kogan, chose to risk everything in a daring escape attempt.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A “must-listen” book
- By Jonathan R Scupin on 09-25-18
By: Joseph Weismann
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Shaman's Crossing, Book One of the Soldier Son Trilogy
- By: Robin Hobb
- Narrated by: John Keating
- Length: 24 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,181
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 947
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Story4 out of 5 stars 950
Hugo and Nebula Award finalist Robin Hobb crafts intricate fantasy tales featuring larger-than-life characters and exotic landscapes. Nevare Burvelle survives the King’s Cavalla Academy—where nepotism and corruption reign—to become a soldier in the Gernian king’s army. As he and his fellow soldiers are thrust onto the front lines of the king’s brutal territorial expansion campaign, they struggle against the Plainspeople—forest-dwellers who possess a powerful magic long dismissed by the Gernians.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Sometimes Magic Isn't A Good Thing
- By Therese M. Woolley on 10-18-13
By: Robin Hobb
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Sophie's Choice
- By: William Styron
- Narrated by: Norman Snow
- Length: 2 hrs and 53 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 248
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 210
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Story4 out of 5 stars 210
In this brilliant, multi-layered novel, a young Southerner, Stingo, wants to become a writer. In Brooklyn, he meets Nathan, a brilliant Jewish intellectual involved in a turbulent love-hate affair with Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman. She has a terrible wound in her past, one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.
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1 out of 5 stars
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THIS IS ABRIDGED
- By J. Flynn on 07-25-16
By: William Styron
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Rena's Promise
- A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz
- By: Rena Kornreich Gelissen, Heather Dune Macadam
- Narrated by: Heather Dune Macadam
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 332
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 308
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Story5 out of 5 stars 304
"I do not hate. To hate is to let Hitler win." - Rena Kornreich Gelissen. On March 26, 1942, the first mass transport of Jews - 999 young women - arrived in Auschwitz. Among them was Rena Kornreich, the 716th woman numbered in camp. A few days later, her sister Danka arrives and so begins a trial of love and courage that will last three years and 41 days, from the beginning Auschwitz death camp to the end of the war.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Excellent Content / Horrible Production
- By Simone on 07-23-15
By: Rena Kornreich Gelissen, and others
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The Kindly Ones
- By: Jonathan Littell
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 39 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 295
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 221
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Story4 out of 5 stars 220
The chilling fictional memoir of Dr. Maximilien Aue, a former Nazi officer who has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France. Max is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music. He is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man, we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Office politics in hell
- By Maine Colonial 🌲 on 04-02-13
By: Jonathan Littell
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The Long Night
- A True Story
- By: Ernst Israel Bornstein
- Narrated by: Ric Jerrom
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 287
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 260
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 260
The Long Night is Ernst Israel Bornstein's first-hand account of what he witnessed in seven concentration camps. Written with remarkable insight and raw emotion, The Long Night paints a portrait of human psychology in the darkest of times. Bornstein tells the stories of those who did all they could do to withstand physical and psychological torture, starvation, and sickness, and openly describes those who were forced to inflict suffering on others.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Feelings, having listened to The Long Night
- By Lisa H on 05-31-18
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Fatelessness
- A Novel
- By: Imre Kertész, Tom Wilkinson - translator
- Narrated by: Josh Bloomberg
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 35
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 35
At the age of 14, György Köves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and, without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn't particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, "You are no Jew." In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, György remains an outsider.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Shockingly Mundane
- By D. A. Elliott on 01-13-20
By: Imre Kertész, and others
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Zama
- By: Antonio Di Benedetto, Esther Allen - preface translation
- Narrated by: Armando Durán
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 48
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 43
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Story4 out of 5 stars 42
Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the 18th century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Lost Master Work of The New World
- By tomasito on 02-28-17
By: Antonio Di Benedetto, and others
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The House of the Dead
- By: Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 123
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 105
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 104
Completed six years after Dostoyevsky's own term as a convict, The House of the Dead is a semi-autobiographical account of life in a Siberian prison camp, and the physical and mental effects it has on those who are sentenced to inhabit it. Alexandr Petrovitch Goryanchikov, a gentleman of the noble class, has been condemned to 10 years of hard labor for murdering his wife.
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5 out of 5 stars
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most accessible dostoevsky book.
- By Calemos on 01-04-22
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The Daughter of Auschwitz
- My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope
- By: Tova Friedman, Malcolm Brabant
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 417
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 382
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Story5 out of 5 stars 381
A powerful memoir by one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, Tova Friedman, following her childhood growing up during the Holocaust and surviving a string of near-death experiences in a Jewish ghetto, a Nazi labor camp, and Auschwitz.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Very interesting and well told
- By Tracy F. on 03-31-23
By: Tova Friedman, and others
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Playing with Fire
- A Novel
- By: Tess Gerritsen
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan, Will Damron
- Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3,208
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,936
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2,928
The first time violinist Julia Ansdell picked up the "Incendio Waltz" in a darkened antique shop in Rome, she knew it was a strikingly unusual composition. The minor key and complex feverish arpeggios have a life of their own. But when she plays the piece, Julia blacks out and awakens to find her small daughter implicated in acts of surprising violence. When she travels to Venice to find the previous owner of the music, she uncovers a heart-stoppingly dark secret....
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3 out of 5 stars
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Somewhat off-key
- By Janice on 11-16-15
By: Tess Gerritsen
What listeners say about The Violin of Auschwitz
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Angela Rhodes
- 11-07-12
A message of hope!
This is the story of Daniel, a violin maker and inmate at Auschwitz concentration camp. For months, Daniel keeps his occupation secret and instead claims to be a carpenter - a more useful profession. When he overhears a musician playing a cracked violin for the camp's commandant, he reveals his skill in order to save the musician from punishment. Soon Daniel finds himself in the middle of a cruel wager between the commandant and the sadistic camp doctor. If Daniel can make a violin of Stradivarius quality, the camp commandant wins a case of the finest burgundy wine. If not, Daniel will be handed over to the camp doctor for use in human experimentation.
Despite the dark theme of this short novel, it carries a message of hope. Amidst so much destruction and cruelty, Daniel manages to create something very beautiful. His friend Bronislov, the musician who plays the violin for the commandant and the camp doctor, sums it up best:
"It isn't true is it, Daniel, that music can tame the beasts? Yet in the end, a song lives."
This novel is very well written, weaving actual Nazi reports from Auschwitz into the narrative. At the end of the story you get to "find out" what happened to the various characters, so there is a nice sense of closure. The narration is also very good - David Colacci's voice is clear and easy to follow, making for no distractions from the story.
If you enjoy stories about the triumph of the human spirit during times of great adversity, you will love this novel. At just under three hours listening time, it asks for very little and delivers a lot.
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