Strong like a lily

“When you have only two pennies, buy a loaf of bread with one and a lily with the other.” This is an ancient Chinese proverb that reminds us of the importance of nourishing the spirit, even in the most desperate situations, for, as Debussy said: “Closing the windows to beauty is against reason and destroys the true meaning of life.”

The Livorno soprano Frida Misul, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, recounted that until the age of twenty she nourished her soul with “a sweet dream of art.” The young woman did not lose heart even after the introduction of the racial laws, changing her surname from Misul to Masoni in order to continue singing in theaters. Unexpectedly, it was her singing teacher, Elena Mancini, who betrayed her by reporting her to the Livorno authorities, causing her arrest and deportation to Auschwitz at only twenty-five years of age. Exhausted by the infernal pace of labor, robbed of her dreams and even of her name, brutally replaced by the number A5383, one evening Frida presented herself at the camp infirmary, so worn out that she no longer even feared death, although she knew that those who did not recover on their own were sent straight to the crematoria.

When a female doctor asked her to sing, Frida gathered her last strength to intone a simple folk song, Mamma. A second SS doctor invited her to continue and, touched by the notes of a Lied by Schubert, assigned her to the block located next to the crematorium, with the task of selecting and mending the clothes left behind by prisoners before entering the gas chambers. In this way her life was saved. The new duty, though morally painful, protected Frida from the cold, the exhausting labor, and physical violence, allowing her to sing for the SS and the Kapos every Sunday, receiving in return something to eat, which she regularly shared with the women in her barrack. But the most precious gift Frida shared with them all was music. She wrote many original songs for her companions, thus easing their loneliness and safeguarding their condition as human beings, because man, as Mahatma Gandhi reminds us, “may trample one flower, two, three… but he will never be able to annihilate the whole spring.”

Frida herself recounted that on New Year’s Eve, after singing Schubert’s Ave Maria and an aria from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly for the SS, her Kapò—usually violent toward her—approached her bed in the middle of the night, deeply moved, caressing her and giving her a slice of bread and meat. Yet at that moment the greatest emotion for Frida was hearing herself called again by her real name. It is the redemptive power of beauty, capable of awakening even the smallest fragment of humanity, however buried and silenced in the abyss of hatred of those who indifferently witness the daily extermination of innocent people. In his novel 1984, George Orwell, describing a totalitarian and illiberal world, writes: “If you can feel that it is worth remaining human even when it has no practical effect whatsoever, then you have defeated them.”

Mauro Tabasso
NP December 2025