The Never-Ending Story

by Hedy Bass

Award-winning journalist, reporter, and columnist Greg Dawson has covered many human-interest stories during his 50-year career. None was so impactful nor personal as the story of the Maitland resident’s own mother, Zhanna Arshanskaya, a young Jewish girl who escaped the genocide of the Nazi invasion of Ukraine in 1941. 

Zhanna’s story of escape from the death march to Drobytsky Yar – which took the lives of thousands of Jews including her parents and grandparents – was poignantly retold in Greg’s book,        Hiding in the Spotlight. Published in 2009, it details how Zhanna and younger sister Frina, both musical prodigies, outwitted the Nazis by taking on non-Jewish identities and using their musical gifts to perform for German occupiers throughout Europe. Now, Greg has adapted the story for a new, critically important audience. With the help of coauthor Susan Hood, he is sharing Zhanna’s courageous tale in a children’s book titled Alias Anna. The book, told in poetic verse, keeps the painful lessons of the Holocaust alive for another generation and shows children how courage and determination can triumph over hate and intolerance.

For Greg, sharing Zhanna’s story with children is especially important because, growing up, he never knew his own mother’s harrowing tale of survival.

Greg was a grown man before Zhanna revealed the details of her past. When asked years later why she didn’t tell him, Zhanna confessed, “I just thought it was too cruel for children.” She simply wanted Greg and his brother to have happy, normal childhoods. Indeed, Greg grew up in a prototypical post-war American home, though his was always filled with music.

“My parents were on the music faculty of Indiana University,” says Greg. “My father, David, played the viola. He was a child prodigy who went to Juilliard on scholarship when he was just 14. My mother was a pianist, also a Juilliard graduate, who gave private lessons and was an instructor at the University’s famed School of Music. My parents held parties for friends, faculty, and visiting artists.”

Renowned guests in the Dawson home included musical virtuosos János Starker, Itzhak Perlman, Dmitri Shostakovich, and an affable fellow Greg’s parents called Lenny. The world knew him as         Leonard Bernstein. 

“It was no big deal to me,” smiles Greg. “These were just my father’s coworkers. A friend’s father had a TV repair shop, and I thought that was really cool.”

Greg remembers hearing his mother playing piano after he went to bed at night, and although he never acquired either parent’s musicality, he believes that music somehow helped him become a writer.

Greg eventually earned recognition as a TV critic, columnist, and feature writer for publications including the Boston Herald, Indianapolis Star, and Orlando Sentinel.

Discovering History

In 1978, NBC aired a mini-series called Holocaust, sparking Greg’s interest in interviewing his mother about her memories during World War II. Though Zhanna provided her son with a broad outline of the toll of war on Ukraine, she never discussed her own harrowing experiences. When Candy, Greg’s wife, suggested he write a book about his mother’s childhood, Zhanna flatly refused to talk about it.

It would take 16 years, and a letter from her 13-year-old granddaughter Aimée, to get Zhanna to speak the unspeakable. Tasked with a school assignment, Greg’s daughter Aimée penned           her letter...

December 4, 1994

Dear Grandma (Z),

...Some specific things I would like to know are what life was like in 1940? What are some major world events that you remember?

Zhanna replied with stunning detail starting with Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939. She spoke of her family’s love of music and how, at ages eight and six, she and Frina were accepted to Ukraine’s Kharkiv Conservatory. The letter takes a painful turn as Zhanna laments the end of a promising future that never came to be. In 1941, the German occupation turned her beloved, cultural city of Kharkiv into ruins:

”Well, at this point of my story I will have to make it very sketchy because it’s too long,” Zhanna wrote. ”It’s much too hard on me, and also because one day I hope to make it known to this world of ours...”

It took years of interviews and research by both Greg and Candy, but he did eventually share his mother’s story with the world. It’s the story of beautiful music juxtaposed with pain and fear. And now, as war once again engulfs Zhanna’s native Ukraine, a new generation will learn how one young person can alter the course of history for themselves, their family, and the world.