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Newtown Square Physician Performs With Yo-Yo Ma

Dunwoody Village Retirement Community in Newtown Square has a unique resident - a retired physician who performed in concert this week with the internationally renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma. As WRTI's Jim Cotter reports, this is but one achievement in a life that has been a series of struggles and successes.

To have reached one's 90th birthday, as Dr. George Horner did in September, is an accomplishment; to achieve this landmark having survived not one, but three Nazi concentration camps, is nothing short of miraculous.  In 1942, George Horner, his parents and his sister were imprisoned in Terezin, the concentration camp near Prague where many culturally gifted Jews were sent as part of a Nazi ruse to fool the Red Cross about the nature of the camps.

Horner’s father was killed soon after the family was moved to Auschwitz. His mother and sister were killed a few days before liberation in another camp. Horner ended the war alone in Buchenwald.

An extremely gifted pianist from an early age, Horner can still play most anything by heart.

This week, George Horner reprises music he performed in Terezin in a concert featuring members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Yo-Yo Ma, in a Boston Symphony Hall benefit concert for the Terezin Music Foundation. Dr. Horner will perform "Theresienstadt March," "Lullaby," and "How Come the Black Man Sits in the Back of the Bus?" All of these works were composed by Terezin prisoner Karel Svenk. Read more about George Horner here.

DrG102113JCLF.mp3
Listen to George Horner play Chopin