Amnon Weinstein turned grief into music again

As he grew up, Amnon Weinstein wondered where his extended family was. Where were his grandfather and grandmother, his uncles and aunts? In reply his mother would reach for a book about Vilnius, then in Poland, their home once, and show him a picture of Ponary forest. “Here they are,” she would say. Under the tall, thin, silent trees.

Gradually he learned about the forest. It was once the loveliest spot in Vilnius, where at weekends people would stroll, picnic and meet friends. Poets wrote verses, painters painted and his father, already in love with violins, played music with his friends. But it was also there that in the second world war the Nazis killed around 100,000 people, 70,000 of them Jews, with rifles and machineguns, burying them crudely under mounds of sand.