Strand Notebook | Prison camp violin has a storied past

The story of the prison camp violin is a story of hope and creativity amid almost impossible odds. It has appeared here before, but during this time, when many in our state are struggling, maybe it will help a little to think of someone who persevered.

In early 1944, U.S. Lt. Clair Cline was flying a B-24 over Holland when it was hit by anti-aircraft fire. The crew bailed out. Cline was captured and imprisoned at Stalag Luft 1, a POW camp in Germany. In 1945, he was liberated.

In 1997, he wrote his story about the violin for Guideposts.

He describes the camp as a dismal place where the POWs “lived in rough wooden barracks, sleeping on bunks with straw-filled burlap sacks on wooden slats.”

Without the Red Cross care packages they got, they would have starved. “But the worst affliction was our uncertainty,” Cline wrote. “Not knowing when the war would end or what would happen (we had heard rumors of prisoners being killed) left us with a constant gnawing worry.”

Cline wrote that since the Geneva Convention prevented officers from being used for labor, and the camp guards adhered to that, the POWs also fought boredom. He wrote letters to his wife and carved wooden B-24s with a penknife he got by trading cigarettes with a guard.

One day, he could stand it no longer. “I tossed aside a half- finished model, looked out a barracks window at a leaden sky and prayed in desperation, ‘Oh, Lord, please help me find something constructive to do.“’

Soon, a prisoner started whistling a song that took Cline’s mind back to his youth in rural Minnesota, and to his love for music and violins.

He thought how sweet it would be to hold and play a violin again, and he was soon wondering if he could make one. He recalled his father telling him that he could make something from nothing and could do anything — if he just found a way — and there was always a way.

Three months later, he had a violin made with bed-slats and chair parts carved with a piece of glass and glued with old glue scraped from chairs. For cigarettes, the German guards supplied cat-gut for strings and a bow.

He wrote, “My most memorable moment was Christmas Eve. As my buddies brooded about home and families, I began playing “Silent Night.” As the notes drifted across the barracks, a voice chimed in, then others. Amid the harmony I heard a different language.”

In the shadows, an elderly white-haired German guard, his eyes wet with tears, was singing with them.

Since the war, the violin has been played in concert halls across America. Cline wrote that after New York Philharmonic Orchestra concertmaster Glenn Dicterow played it in concert, he called Cline and said it was “an amazing achievement.”

Cline wrote, “Not really, I thought. More like a gift from God.”

After Cline’s death in 2010, his grandson, a cellist with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, donated the violin to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.

This story was originally published October 8, 2015 at 3:00 AM with the headline "Strand Notebook | Prison camp violin has a storied past."