Piano that escaped Nazi theft, bombing centerpiece of Cotati recital

If only this piano could talk.

But of course, in the right hands, played by the right musician, it can.

And on Saturday night it will.

And what a story it has to tell.

The Steinway baby grand piano that is today housed at Congregation Ner Shalom in Cotati will be a centerpiece of a live performance from acclaimed New York-based musician Susan Salm. And it has a back story for the ages.

Salm, co-founder of the Raphael Trio and a professional cellist who will perform with the piano at a concert at Ner Shalom Saturday night, knows the story better than most.

The piano is a Steinway Model O, crafted in Hamburg, Germany. It was an engagement gift from Salm’s father, Arthur Salm of Cologne to his fiancee, Erna Mann, a concert pianist.

It was gifted in 1934.

Fast forward a couple of tumultuous years. The Salms, now married, had acquired a second piano by the time Nazi persecution of Jews was escalating and terrorizing a nation.

In the face of Nazi theft of both Jewish families’ goods and businesses, the Salms had both pianos, as well as Arthur’s personal library, shipped to a warehouse in Rotterdam.

And then Arthur was arrested.

By then a successful business owner who owned a household goods factory and vending machine plant, he was taken into custody by Nazi police and eventually sent to Dachau, a concentration camp outside of Munich, according to a lengthy profile featured in the Silver Society of Canada’s newsletter.

Almost immediately Erna came up with a ruse to free her husband. She wrote Nazi party officials, informing them that without Arthur’s leadership, the robust vending machine plant would have to lay off as many as 150 German workers.

“She was fearless,” Susan Salm said of her mother. “She somehow convinced this Nazi, something to the effect of ‘You really need my husband, he’s going to tell you how to run this business and you need him.’”

Arthur was released, with the understanding that he would help steady the business, sell it for nothing, and then leave Germany for good.

“My father said, ‘It’s a deal’ or something to that effect,” Susan Salm said.

The Salms’ escape route took them through Belgium and the Netherlands and England, eventually landing in New York but making their permanent home in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.

They were safe. Their immediate family — parents and siblings — had also managed to escape and were safe.

But what about those pianos?

They were, if you recall, warehoused for years in Rotterdam, a city almost entirely leveled by German bombs.

“By some miraculous fate, that warehouse was not bombed,” said Arthur and Erna’s son David Salm of Santa Rosa.

So both pianos, and Arthur Salm’s lifetime collection of books, were shipped to Chicago.

And it was there that they came back to life.

The Salms’ apartment in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood would regularly burst at the seams with guests who came to hear the professionally trained Erna play.

“The fire marshal would never allow it to happen today but there were commonly 200 to 250 people attending,” David Salm said.

Growing up, it felt typical, he said. Only later did he develop a fuller view of how he and his three siblings, all of whom were encouraged to pick up an instrument, grew up.

“My sister Evelyn went to school with Herbie Hancock, he played on that (piano),” he said. “Rudolph Ganz ... would come to the apartment and perform at these house concerts and we just thought that was normal. We didn’t recognize what an unusual experience it really was.”

It was Susan Salm who followed her mother into professional music. But not piano.

Salm studied cello at The Julliard School in New York.

And she toured Europe, playing alongside her mother.

“It was wonderful, it was absolutely great,” Salm said. “Not only were we close as mother and daughter but as friends and colleagues. It was very special, a kind of relationship that few people were able to have with family.”

Erna Salm died in 2001. Arthur died in 1988.

But that connection is rekindled in a way today when Salm gets to play next to her mother’s piano.

Which she will on Saturday night.

Years ago, the Salm children donated the family’s baby grand Steinway to Ner Shalom, a congregation members say is known in the community for its connection to, and embrace of, music.

“Our services are not run of the mill services, using a book from which we read prayers,” said Leiah Bowden, volunteer public relations contact for the congregation. “Most usually, we sing or chant melodies which uses traditional liturgy.”

And often, the congregation opens its doors to all for concerts and musical events.

After all, their home is the former, somewhat legendary, live music venue The Cotati Cabaret.

So it is there that Susan Salm, like she did decades ago, will play her cello alongside her mother’s treasured Steinway.

But on this night, it won’t be Erna Salm sitting next to her, it will be Toni Pearson.

Pearson studied music at the University of Adelaide and performed regularly with the Australian Society of Keyboard Music.

Together they will play pieces by Beethoven, Loes Janacek, Franz Schubert and Max Bruch.

It isn’t the first time Susan has reunited with the family piano. But it’s a moving experience every time, she said.

Susan Salm recalled the first time she played at Ner Shalom. It was perhaps, five years ago.

“To walk out and have my mother’s piano there?...It was so touching,” she said. “It was a big thing that this instrument had landed here. There is so much powerful history, when you think it survived so long and that it is still a beautiful piano.”

And the gift, Susan Salm said, goes both ways.

Yes, the Salm children bequeathed the piano to this small congregation in Cotati, but to know that it plays such a central role in congregational life and gatherings, is a gift in return, she said.

“I’m thrilled. It makes me very happy,” Susan Salm said. “I think it makes all of us in the family happy to know that that instrument, that has survived so much and that meant so much to our mother, that it is still in use and making people happy. What more could you ask for? It’s a great legacy. We are so thrilled that Ner Shalom wanted to treasure and use that piano.

“It’s as much a gift to us as it is to them.”

You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Instagram @kerry.benefield.