Her hair was in pigtails and her white dress was new when Zhanna Arshansky took the stage in a little theater in Ukraine in 1942. The 15-year-old piano prodigy played Chopin, Brahms, and Schubert. When she was done, the men in the audience rose to their feet and shouted “Noch einmal!” “Once more!” Some of the cheering men wore the black uniform of the SS. Some were field generals in Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Not one of the Nazi officers listening to her play knew her secret — that that she was Jewish.
