Shony Alex Braun, renowned concert violinist, has written a simply wonderful symphony called the "Symphony of the Holocaust," which is soon to be performed in Israel. It is a profoundly moving and emotional experience in that it is drawn from Shony’s own personal recollections as a Holocaust survivor.

Shony was born and lived his early life in the Rumanian province of Transylvania. As part of a loving Orthodox family, he was taught the Hebrew alphabet at the age of three. By the time he was five, he was reading the prayer books, praying daily, and going to synagogue each Sabbath.

His musical education began at the age of five. By age eight he had received a scholarship to a musical conservatory near his home. He loved his music and his instrument, and he practiced incessantly. Then, at the age of ten he made his concert debut as a soloist when he played on Radio Bucharest, heard all over Europe.

At age eleven, Shony began writing music. When he was thirteen, he received a scholarship to attend the renowned Budapest Academy of Music. His future seemed assured until he came face to face with the obsession that one man had to murder every Jew in Europe. That man was Adolph Hitler, and his obsession ultimately resulted in the death of some six million Jews, including over one million children.

In May of 1944, Shony’s life changed forever when the Hungarian village police ordered his family out of their home to be driven to an abandoned brick factory in the beginning of a journey that would end four days later at Auschwitz. There he witnessed as Dr. Joseph Mengele, the Angel of Death, separated his family, with his mother and sister destined immediately for the gas chambers. His father, brother, and older sister were spared immediate execution. When Shony stood before Mengele, he was a small, frail thirteen-year-old; however, he had the chutzpah to tell an incredulous Mengele that he was sixteen. Miraculously he was spared.

During the next year, Shony was repeatedly and miraculously delivered from death. He also witnessed as guards literally beat his father to death. His brother, deathly ill from typhoid, was too sick to rise in the presence of an SS officer, who stepped on his neck until he choked to death.

Still, in the face of all of this horror that was more than an adult could bear, Shony did not loose his faith in God and in the fact that he would be delivered. When the Allies neared Dachau, Nazi soldiers began to kill inmates, hoping to cover their crimes. In the confusion that ensued, Shony ran for the woods, all the while whispering, "Shema Yisrael, adonai elohainu, adonai ehad", "Her O Israel, the Lord is our God; the Lord is One!" Suddenly, he realized that he had been shot in the chest. A non-Jewish French prisoner who was a doctor rushed to his aid, telling the SS officer who aimed a revolver at Shony’s head, "Don’t shoot, he’ll be dead in three minutes." Dachau was subsequently liberated on the very day that the mined camp was scheduled to be blown up in order to kill all of the prisoners.

Later as Shony lay at the point of death in a Munich hospital, suffering from typhoid, pneumonia, malnutrition, frostbite, and the infected wound in his chest, his request for a violin was granted, and he became stronger from that moment, buoyed by his music. A young Hungarian Jew, named Shari, heard his music and asked to see the dying boy whose only wish was to play the violin. Four years later Shari became his wife.

Shony subsequently attended the Academy of Music in Munich and received his masters degree from Mozarteum Academy in Salzburg, Austria. Shortly thereafter he and Shari moved to the United States, where he enjoyed great success with performances in movies and in dozens of television series. In 1984, at the first White House meeting in history of Christian and Jewish leaders and broadcasters, he performed his own composition, "Hebrew Melodies," the music born in the concentration camps. It was this composition that was later incorporated into the "Symphony of the Holocaust."

Shony Alex Braun is a man diminutive in stature and frail in physique; however, he has an enormously large heart and a profound musical talent. He has touched the hearts of thousands of Christians with his heart-wrenching recollections of Holocaust memories and with the exquisite beauty of his music.