The Chord of Life

Herbert Zipper does not always trust words. Language, he says, cannot speak to the extremes of human experience. Words cannot express the bitter lows and breathless highs the way sharps and flats cut through a jumble of emotion with piercing truth.

As a conductor and composer, Zipper learned the true power of music in the dim silence of a Nazi concentration camp, where he formed a secret orchestra and played illicit concerts to an audience of ravaged inmates. He carried it through his life to the scarred schools of inner-city Los Angeles, where, up until a year ago, he led concerts and taught music to children.

Now, at 92, he hangs on to the notes in his head as he fights lung cancer. Age and disease have made his face gaunt. Talking leaves him out of breath. But music still speaks to his resilient spirit. It comes to him while he’s lying in bed or gazing at the blue sea below his Pacific Palisades home. And it soars with grand optimism when he watches the scores of birds descend on the feeders around his home. Because in Germany’s Buchenwald camp, there were no birds.

Zipper was a talented Viennese musician and conductor, thriving in the elegant cultural scene, when the Nazis came marching into Austria in March 1938. Schooled for a life of privilege, slated to move in the circle of Vienna’s artistic elite, he was thrust into a dark world where he had to struggle to hold on to the music that suffused his previous life.

At 7 one chilly morning, Zipper was one of many Austrian Jews rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps. He was sent to Dachau, a cold row of barracks in the countryside outside of Munich. On his first day, the SS commander welcomed the new inmates with these words: “In Dachau, everything is prohibited--even life. If it sometimes happens, then it is just by accident.”

Composers from Vienna and musicians from the Munich Philharmonic were there, too. Slowly, Zipper and his friends began chipping away at the brutality of their imprisonment.

They hoarded pieces of spare wood, whittling them into roughly hewn violins and other instruments. Zipper told a sympathetic SS officer that he needed metal strings; two days later he found a pile of them under his pillow.

With 11 makeshift instruments--some no more than hollow boxes wrapped with taut strings--they formed a clandestine orchestra. On Sunday afternoons, in the dank coolness of an abandoned outhouse, the Dachau musicians strung together performances for the shattered men. The guards, intent on a Sunday of relaxation, loosened their vigilant watch over the prisoners on these afternoons. They were never caught.

“I realized in Dachau that the arts in general have the power to keep you not just alive, but to make your life meaningful even under the most dreadful circumstances,” Zipper said in deliberate, accented tones.

Zipper’s daily job was to push a cart full of stones through the camp. It took him under a sign fastened into the entrance to Dachau: “Arbeit Macht Frei,” or “Work Makes You Free.” From that taunting message, Zipper and his friend, writer Jura Soyfer, crafted a “Dachau Song,” a tune of resistance that challenged the grueling psychological wear of the camp.

“I taught it to a few guys with the idea of keeping it alive,” Zipper said. “I had no idea that within a few months, all thousand inhabitants of Dachau would know that song.”

“Dachau Song” would spread from camp to camp, emerging as one of the powerful and tightly embraced resistance songs during the Holocaust.

But music could not penetrate the misery of Buchenwald, where Zipper was soon transferred. He cannot find words for it. He talks about the birds that picked grain from the fields around Buchenwald. The prisoners had to watch them from afar, because not a single creature would descend into the walled prison. The trees were empty, Zipper said, except for the bodies that often dangled off the limbs.

“Everything was meaningless in Buchenwald,” he said.

Zipper’s father in Paris managed to get him a visa and rescue him from Buchenwald before the Nazis began their Final Solution: the gassing of the Jews.

Buchenwald went to Manila to join his longtime fiancee and take over as director of the Manila Symphony. But no sooner had he arrived than the Japanese invaded. Once again, Zipper was imprisoned--this time for refusing to conduct the orchestra under occupation. After getting out of jail, he worked as a secret agent for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, using his radio to report on Japanese military activities in the bay.

As people emerged from the rubble of a liberated Manila in 1945, Zipper once again saw a void that words could not fill. He assembled his orchestra and in the bombed-out remnants of Santa Cruz Church, conducted a performance of Beethoven’s Third Symphony that lingered in the smoky air, shimmering.

“In the second movement, there was an unbelievable stillness in which we could hear easily the bombardment of the Japanese positions about 30 miles away. Can you imagine that?” He demonstrated the sound, drumming his fingers on his knee. “Ba-dump. Ba-dump--an accompaniment to that second movement.”

After the war, Zipper turned his thoughts to the rebuilding of culture, to bringing music and art where there is silence and despair.

He and his wife went to Brooklyn, N.Y., where he was conductor of the Brooklyn Symphony. At the New School for Social Research, he became friends with famed poet Langston Hughes and together they organized music programs in Harlem. Zipper was the first to bring women and African Americans into the Brooklyn Symphony. He also began forging his career as a pioneering music educator, gathering the orchestra members, loading them on buses and taking them into the cafeterias and gymnasiums of Brooklyn’s public schools.

He continued this effort in Chicago and then, beginning in the early 1970s, in Los Angeles, when he joined the faculty of USC’s School of the Performing Arts. For the last 20 years, Zipper has been assembling musicians and giving performances to underprivileged children at schools around Los Angeles.

“I don’t tell them anything about music,” he said. “The most important thing is that the music speaks for itself, that they know it and become aware of what it can do to them.”

Until he was found to have cancer last fall, Zipper continued giving concerts and volunteering at Crossroads School, a private academy in Santa Monica.

Paul Cummins, president of Crossroads, is also the author of Zipper’s biography, “Dachau Song,” published in 1992. When Cummins started writing the book 10 years ago, he met with Zipper at 8 p.m. every Sunday--a long-standing engagement that has continued to this day.

“The experience of knowing him has deepened me in ways that I’ll probably never fully understand,” Cummins said. Zipper’s inspiration encouraged Cummins to set up a foundation at Crossroads that funds arts teachers for five public schools. “It has redoubled my commitment to bringing the arts to underprivileged children. His example of what you can accomplish if you set your mind to it is extraordinary.”

Zipper will turn 93 on April 27. The celebration will be small--just a few close friends. In honor of his birthday, an Academy Award-nominated documentary about his life will air at 10 p.m. April 22 on KCET Channel 28. “Never Give Up: The 20th Century Odyssey of Herbert Zipper,” a short film directed by Terry Sanders, takes a look back on melodies and strains of Zipper’s life--something he rarely does himself.

Even now, Zipper spends his days reading scores and conducting the music in his head. He watches dozens of birds flutter in front of his house at the well-stocked feeders. He says he tries to think deeply and purely, not with nostalgia, about his life’s journey, with hope and energy about how society can heal its pain.

“My ambition,” he said, “is to be a good ancestor.”