Dean Black's great-grandfather’s violin.
Black wore his on his back throughout Europe, enclosed in a nearly indestructible carbon-fiber case.
Dean and Terri Black of Pawleys Island in their home, along with their dog, Ruby, pose behind Dean’s pedal steel guitar. They’re holding his great-grandfather’s violin and its original case. A patented hybrid guitar/lap steel guitar creation of Black’s sits on a stand.
A 1916 postcard of Beuthen, Germany.
Dean’s mother, Eva Black, pictured at age 13, before escaping Nazi Germany. She is playing her grandfather’s violin and would go on to enjoy a long career as a concert violinist performing throughout the U.S.
Eva Black, pictured at age 2.
Located in Nazi-occupied Poland, the Sobibor death camp operated 1942-43. Black’s grandmother, Sabine Landsberger, died at the hands of the Nazis at the age of 82, either at the camp or en route. Black says the history is unclear. She is listed as a victim at the Holocaust Memorial in the Dutch Museum in Amsterdam.
The Sobibor death camp.
The stunning and ornate Opera Slaska in Bytom, Poland is the theater which once bore the name of Dean Black’s great-grandfather, Franz Landsberger. It was rededicated and his name restored in a 2024 ceremony.
First chair violinist Agata Guzy plays the 200-year-old violin for the first time in some 100 years in the theatre Dean’s great-grandfather built.
Agata Guzy with the 200-year-old violin.
erri and Dean Black at the theater’s rededication ceremony standing in front of the Franz Landsberger plaque which had been removed by the Nazis.
The cover of a book about Landsberger.
A view of Beuthen downtown (now Bytom in Poland) seen from the Heinitz coal mine in a German postcard published by Geyer Verlag from Breslau probably after 1930.
At his home in Pawleys Island, Dean Black holds the original “coffin” case of his great-grandfather’s 200-year-old violin. He traveled through Europe to Poland with the violin protected by the adjacent carbon fiber case.
Dean and Terri Black were VIP guests at the rededication of Dean ’s great-grandfather’s theater in Bytom Poland, June, 2024.
A group of Franz Landsberger’s direct descendants who made the trip from around the globe to attend the rededication.
