The Piano Player of Budapest

April 22, 2024
British singer de Bastion’s poignant first book nimbly reconstructs the life of her Jewish paternal grandfather, Stephen de Bastion, who was born Istvan Bastyai vol Holzer in 1907 Hungary and survived the Holocaust. Drawing on tapes that her grandfather recorded about his life, de Bastion pieces together a narrative that gathers steam in 1940, when Stephen was a professional pianist in Switzerland. Despite his mother’s protestations, he returned home to Hungary, only to be separated from his parents and deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1944. There, Stephen witnessed cruelties that haunted him for decades, such as walking “past corpses of men who had pulled down their trousers to ‘do their business’ and had instantly frozen to death.” Though he survived, got married, and immigrated to England in 1948, Stephen never returned to playing piano professionally. Still, his love of music serves as a powerful undercurrent throughout the narrative. In an atmospheric touch, de Bastion utilizes the family’s piano, which miraculously survived the Holocaust, as a vector for Stephen’s emotional experience (as he suffers through “the hours of the work, the humiliation,” at the camp, “dust settles” on the unplayed piano; when “the layer grows thick enough,” it produces a “muted sound”). This strikes a moving and melancholy note.

June 1, 2024
When Roxanne de Bastion inherits a baby grand Bl�thner piano, she embarks on a journey through her family's past. The piano belonged to her paternal grandfather, Stephen de Bastion, who was born Istvan Bastyai von Holzer in Budapest in 1907. A talented musician and composer, he also left a collection of cassette tapes on which he recorded his life story. And what a story it is. After a stint at the family's textile business, he left to pursue a musical career. Then the world changed. During WWII he was taken to a Russian forced labor camp, then to the concentration camp at Mauthausen. He survived those horrors, and upon his return to Budapest, he found that his piano had also survived, and when he left Hungary for England, the piano went along, too. De Bastion, a singer-songwriter, skillfully blends family stories and memories into a virtuoso narrative of courage, resilience, loss, and survival. This powerful and moving story is rooted in heartbreaking history, family pride, and a belief in the power of music.

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Starred review from July 12, 2024

Singer/songwriter and artist advocate de Bastion inherited her Bl�thner baby grand piano after her father died in 2019. The piano had been in her family for more than 100 years; in 1905, her great-grandfather bought it as an engagement gift for his wife-to-be. De Bastionalways knew that the piano, with its beautiful, sweet tone, was special, but as she went through her father's home, she found more treasures: boxes and drawers filled with old cassette tapes, CDs, letters, books, and photographs documenting her grandfather Stephen's life as a popular pianist, composer, and songwriter in Budapest. Her book is an account of this family history. Nazis killed Stephen's immediate family members during World War II; he too was captured by Nazis and later sent to a hard labor camp by the invading Russians.and de Bastion reveals that music lovers who had heard him play the piano were able to help him escape. VERDICT A most moving, memorable memoir that expertly incorporates sensory details. Readers will be able to easily envision de Bastion's grandfather. his love of music and great talent for it, his strength and resilience during the war, and the power of his music to keep him alive.--Marcia Welsh

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2024
A somber narrative derived from archival work left by a Holocaust survivor portrays an era in Budapest just before and during early World War II. Singer-songwriter de Bastion is the granddaughter of the protagonist of this book, Istvan Bastyai von Holtzer (later known as Stephen), a Jewish musician and composer who had a fabulous career as a working pianist across Europe before he was sent to German camps after the Nazis invaded in March 1944. Until that year, Hungary was a German ally, which meant that Jews were mostly protected by the pro-Nazi regime, despite their fate elsewhere in Europe. Through cassette tapes the author discovered in the possession of her recently deceased father, she learned that Stephen had narrated his "war story" rather selectively, but the author was able to fill in many other details while researching the history of the era. Stephen was the eldest of four born to a family of nonreligious Hungarian Jews. His father was a wealthy textile entrepreneur, and the family lived in a penthouse apartment in central Budapest, and one of the home's main focal points was a Bl�thner piano. Stephen disdained business, but he became an accomplished pianist for hire--in films, nightclubs, etc.--in Budapest and across Europe. As the author relates, he pursued his passion while "blissfully blinkered" regarding political events until October 1942, when he was summoned to provide forced labor for the Russian war front. Although he managed to survive the horrific conditions, when the Russians broke through, he escaped to Budapest to see his family, only to face deportation to Nazi death camps along with 440,000 Hungarian Jews. De Bastion ably pieces together this poignant tale despite Stephen's silences, offering a memorable account of family and resilience. A painfully moving story of how a family piano served as a cherished reminder of long-lost but not forgotten relationships.

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