Blond, blue-eyed Ilse Strube put it bluntly: “My parents don't want me to befriend a Jewish girl!” Ilse had quickly become fast friends with Anneliese Landau at the very start of their public education in the city of Halle, along the river Saale in Germany (in the middle of Germany then, but today in eastern Germany). Paired as desk mates, the two young children were inseparable as they navigated life outside of family and home for the first time. But, on the last day of that initial school week, Ilse left for recess with another little girl. Her friendship with Landau was over, and, for the first time, Landau knew she was different. “I felt stunned, felt beaten, what did these parents mean?” That early experience was the beginning of what Landau would later call a “black thread” winding its way through her entire life.1 The thread was always connected to loss—of friends like Ilse but also of loved ones in death. Landau had only one constant companion: music. For her, then, music was another sort of thread, one that held her life together, as best it could, when everything was falling apart.

Born on March 5, 1903, Landau grew up to become a music historian, earning her PhD in musicology in 1930. In Germany and the United States, she would establish herself as an unusually effective music lecturer, teacher, and promoter. She had dark hair and eyes and a full face with small lips. As an adult, she stood only five feet tall. Though diminutive, she could command audiences as she talked about music in vivid detail—always with live musical examples—a performance in its own right. With genuine excitement she offered anecdotes and stories about a composition's creation and performance, and her excitement was contagious. Audiences responded to her in kind. Landau performed in this way on the airwaves as a pioneer in early German radio and as a lecturer in the Berlin Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Culture League). In this organization she worked in circumstances unfathomable to most—a Jewish institution created for Jews in Nazi Germany.