Laurent de Brunhoff, the French artist who for almost seventy years cherished his father’s creation, a beloved, very Gallic and very civilized elephant named Babar, including sending him to a haunted castle, to New York City and into space – died Friday at his home in Key West, Florida. He was 98.

The cause was complications of a stroke, said his wife, Phyllis Rose.

Babar was born one evening in 1930 in a leafy suburb of Paris. Laurent, then five, and his brother, Mathieu, four, had trouble sleeping. Their mother, Cécile de Brunhoff, a pianist and music teacher, began telling a story about an orphaned baby elephant who flees the jungle and flees to Paris, which is conveniently nearby.

The boys were captivated by the story and in the morning they ran off to tell their father, Jean de Brunhoff, an artist; he embraced the story and began sketching the little elephant, whom he named Babar, and detailing his adventures.

In Paris, Jean imagined, Babar is rescued by a wealthy woman – simply called the Old Lady – who introduces him to all kinds of modern pleasures. Armed with the Old Lady’s bag, Babar visits a department store, where he rides the elevator up and down, which irritates the operator: “This isn’t a toy, Mr. Elephant.” He buys a suit in “an increasingly green shade” and, although the year is 1930, a pair of gaiters, the fine, gaping footwear of a 19th-century gentleman.

He drives the Old Lady’s car, enjoys a bubble bath and gets lessons in math and other subjects. But he misses his old life and cries for his mother, and when his young cousins ​​Arthur and Celeste track him down, he returns with them to the jungle – but not before giving Arthur and Celeste nice clothes of their own.

At home, the old king of the elephants has died after eating a bad mushroom (these things happened often) and the rest of the elephants, impressed by Babar’s modernity – his nice green suit, his car and his education – make him their new king. Babar asks Celeste to be his queen.

“Histoire de Babar” (“The Story of Babar”), an oversized, beautifully illustrated picture book recounting Babar’s escapade in Jean de Brunhoff’s continuous script, was published in 1931. Six more picture books followed before Jean died of tuberculosis in 1937, when he was 37 and Laurent was only 12.

The last two books were only partially colored at Jean’s death and Laurent finished the job. Like his father, Laurent trained as a painter, worked with oil paint and exhibited his abstract works in a Parisian gallery. But when he turned 21, he decided to continue Babar’s adventures.

“If I became a writer and illustrator of children’s books,” Mr. Laurent wrote in 1987 for the catalog accompanying an exhibition of his work in the Mary Ryan Gallery in Manhattan, “It wasn’t because I set out to make children’s books; I wanted Babar to live on (or, as some might say, my father). I wanted to stay in his country, the elephant world that is both a utopia and a gentle satire on human society.”

His first book, ‘Babar’s Cousin: That Rascal Arthur’, was published in 1946. Mr. de Brunhoff would write and illustrate more than 45 Babar books. For the first few years, many readers did not realize that he was not the original author, so fully had he realized Babar’s world and its essence: his quiet morality and equanimity.

“Babar, c’est moi,” Mr. de Brunhoff often said. In every respect, artist and elephant shared the same Gallic urbanity and optimistic outlook.

In the 1960s, Babar was a very famous elephant indeed.

Charles de Gaulle was a fan. The Babar books, he said, promoted “a certain idea of ​​France.” So did Maurice Sendak, although Mr. Sendak said he was traumatized for years by Babar’s origin story: the brutal murder of his mother by a hunter.

“That sublimely happy childhood was lost after just two full pages,” Mr. Sendak wrote in the introduction to “Babar’s Family Album” (1981), a reissue of six titles, including Jean’s original.

Mr. Sendak and Mr. de Brunhoff became friends, however, and the latter encouraged the former, as Mr. Sendak wrote, to abandon his “Freudian excavations.”

‘I reassured him’ Mr. de Brunhoff told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “I said bluntly that the mother died leaving the little hero behind to struggle with life alone.”

There were other criticisms. Many claimed that Babar was an avatar of sexism, colonialism, capitalism and racism. Two early works were particularly offensive: Jean de Brunhoff’s “The Travels of Babar” (1934) and Laurent de Brunhoff’s “Babar’s Picnic” (1949) both depicted “savages,” drawn in the brutal style of their time, as cartoon images of Africans . When Toni Morrison, then a young editor at Random House, Babar’s publisher, objected to the images in “Babar’s Picnic” in the late 1960s, Mr. de Brunhoff asked that it be withdrawn from print. And he made sure to leave out the racist scenes from “The Travels of Babar” when that title was included in “Babar’s Family Album.”

‘Should we burn Babar?’ author and educator Herbert Kohl wondered in the title of a 1995 book subtitled “Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories.” No, he concluded, but he nevertheless argued that Babar’s stories were elitist because they glorified capitalism and unearned wealth. Where did the Old Lady get her money from? Mr. Kohl asked, irritated by the implication “that it is perfectly normal and even wonderful that some people have wealth for which they do not have to work.”

Nonsense, Mr. De Brunhoff told the Los Angeles Times, responding to an earlier Marxist analysis of his stories: “These are stories, not social theory.”

They were also works of art, and critics compared Mr. de Brunhoff’s use of color and naive style to painters such as Henri Rousseau.

“With ‘Madeline’ by Bemelmans and ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ by Sendak” Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker wrote in 2008When the Morgan Library exhibited the sketches and models of the early efforts of both Jean and Laurent du Brunhoff, “the Babar books have become part of the common language of childhood, the library of the early mind.”

Like Babar, Laurent de Brunhoff was born in Paris on August 30, 1925 into a family of artists and publishers. His father’s siblings were all in the magazine business: his brothers, Michel and Maurice, were the editors of French Vogue and La Décor Aujourd’Hui, an art and design magazine, respectively; his sister, Cosette, a photographer, was married to the director of Les Jardins de Modes, a fashion magazine, and it was under that magazine’s imprint that Babar was first published.

Laurent worked differently from his father, who conceived his stories as a whole, narrative and photos together. (Jean had also wanted to involve his wife as co-author, but she adamantly refused. “My mother was absolutely against it,” Laurent said, “because she thought that even if she supported the idea, the entire creation was my father’s. .”) For Laurent, the idea and the images came first – what if Babar was abducted by aliens, or practiced yoga? – and then he started sketching and painting what that might look like. When he married his second wife, Mrs. Rose, professor emeritus of English at Wesleyan University, they often collaborated on the text.

The couple met at a party in Paris in the mid-1980s – Ms Rose was working on a biography of Josephine Baker – and fell passionately for each other. “After dinner we sat together on the couch,” Mr. de Brunhoff told an interviewer in 2015. “She said, ‘I love your work.’ I said, ‘I don’t know your work, but I love your eyes.’ And that was the beginning.”

Mr. de Brunhoff joined Ms. Rose in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1985, taking Babar with him. The couple married in 1990 and later lived in New York City and Key West.

In 1987, Mr. de Brunhoff sold the rights to license his elephant to a businessman named Clifford Ross, who then sold those rights to a Canadian company, Nelvana Ltd., with the understanding that Mr. Ross would remain involved in its conception . of future products. What followed was what The New York Times described as “an elephantine array” of Babar-abilia – including Babar pajamas and slippers, wallpaper and wrapping paper, perfume, fruit drinks, backpacks, blankets and bibs. There was “Babar: The Movie” (1989), which critics said was boring and violent, and, that same year, a television series, which critics said was less boring and less violent.

And then a lawsuit followed. Mr. Ross found Nelvana’s creations tasteless and demeaning to Babar’s wholesome image, as he charged in a lawsuit. Mr. de Brunhoff stayed out of the fray with typical equanimity.

“Celesteville is a kind of utopian city, a place where there are no robberies or crimes, where everyone has a good relationship with each other, so there really is no need for lawyers there,” Mr. du Brunhoff told The New York Times.

Federal District Court Judge Kenneth Conboy agreed.

“In Babar’s world, all colors are pastel, all rain showers are short-lived, and all enemies are more or less benign,” he wrote in his decision, ruling that Nelvana had wrongly excluded Mr. Ross from licensing. “The storylines celebrate the perseverance of goodness, work, patience and perseverance in the face of ignorance, discouragement, inertia and adversity. If only the values ​​of Babar’s world were evident from the papers filed in this lawsuit?

In addition to his wife, Mr. de Brunhoff is also survived by his brothers Mathieu and Thierry-Jean; a daughter, Anne de Brunhoff, and son, Antoine de Brunhoff, from his first marriage to Marie-Claude Bloch, which ended in divorce; a stepson, Ted Rose; and several grandchildren.

“Babar and I both enjoy a friendly family life,” Mr. de Brunhoff wrote in 1987. “We take equal care to avoid overdramatizing the events or situations that arise. If we take the right, efficient steps, we both believe there will be a happy ending. When writing a book, my intention is to entertain, not to deliver a ‘message’. But still you can of course say that there is a message in the Babar books, a message of non-violence.”

Babar’s stories have been translated into 18 languages, including Japanese and Hebrew, and have sold many millions of copies. Mr. de Brunhoff’s last book, “Babar’s Guide to Paris,” was published in 2017.

“Laurent’s idea of ​​a good story,” Ms. Rose said on the phone, “is this: something bad happens, no one panics, and it all works out.”

Norman Miller was visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with his sons Steven and Michael in 1999 when they stopped by an exhibit detailing the key Nazi leaders who carried out the extermination of six million Jews. Pointing to a photo of Arthur Seyss-Inquart, a high-ranking but not widely known Nazi, he made a stunning admission.

“I told you I arrested him, didn’t I?” said Norman Miller.

“We were in disbelief,” Steven Miller recalled in an interview. “We turned to him and said, ‘What?’”

Until then the eldest Mr. Miller had not said a word about it Mr Seyss-Inquart, who as Reich Commissioner for the German-occupied Netherlands was responsible for the deportation of thousands of Dutch Jews to concentration camps. He had held a similar job in Poland, where he was known for policies that promoted Jewish persecution.

The chance meeting between Mr. Miller, a German refugee serving in the British Army, and Mr. Seyss-Inquart took place on May 7, 1945, the day Germany surrendered to the Allies to end the war in Europe. Mr. Miller was part of the Royal Welch Fusiliers regiment, which guarded a checkpoint between the American and British sectors in Hamburg.

When a brown Opel, which had been driving erratically, was forced to stop at the checkpoint, one of the four men in the vehicle said he had papers for Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery to sign. One of the soldiers asked a German police officer if the papers were in order, according to a newspaper published by the regiment after the incident. The officer said the papers, which were in German, looked good. But the fusilier was not satisfied with the answer.

So he asked Mr. Miller, who read German, for help.

“He came up to me and showed me the paper.” Mr. Miller said this in an oral history interview with the Holocaust Museum in 2013. (The regiment’s newspaper said the fusilier brought all four men to Mr. Miller.) And then, he said, he realized that “we have a big Nazi fish here.”

Mr. Miller, who knew Mr. Seyss-Inquart’s name and face from the newspapers, recalled having him arrested and sent to the battalion commander. He was convicted of war crimes by the Allied military tribunal in Nuremberg and hanged on October 16, 1946.

But Mr. Miller did not get much satisfaction from the arrest.

“I mean, I wasn’t overjoyed.” he said in an interview with WNBC-TV last year in New York City. “It didn’t help to bring my parents and my family back.”

Mr. Miller died on February 24 in a Manhattan hospital. He was 99.

His son Steven confirmed the death.

Mr. Miller was born Norbert Müller on June 2, 1924 in Tann in der Rhön, Germany, and moved with his family to Nuremberg in 1930. His father, Sebald, was a teacher, and his mother, Laura (Jüngster) Müller, managed the home.

The Müllers’ desire to leave Germany became even more urgent during the Kristallnacht pogroms, in November 1938. Nazis entered the family’s apartment and used axes to destroy furniture, musical instruments including a piano and cello, feather beds and a cupboard with pots filled with jam to smash. and pickles.

The following year, Norbert, his parents and his sister Susanne moved to another building in Nuremberg that was only for Jews. They shared an apartment with an older couple.

Despite their desire to keep their family intact, Norbert’s parents were only able to secure safe passage for Norbert through Kindertransport, the British rescue operation that brought some 10,000 children from German-occupied countries to safety.

During a stopover during the trip, in Cologne, Germany, Mr. Miller’s father realized that his son did not have the proper paperwork to reach the Netherlands. Mr Miller said his father sneaked into the closed British consulate and emerged with the signed document that he was to board the Kindertransport train and later enter Britain on a ship from the Dutch seaport of Vlissingen. (Mr. Miller believed that his father most likely bribed someone to get the document.)

It was late August 1939. Only a few days remained before Germany would invade Poland on September 1 and start World War II. Fifteen-year-old Norbert’s family would never get the visas they needed.

In London, Mr. Miller lived in an orphanage and later in rented rooms. He also learned to weld.

But he was alone, a teenager without his mother, father and sister. He and his family exchanged letters over the next two years.

One day his parents sent him a terrifying photo that resembled a vision of wishing they had never been separated. A photo of Norbert was inserted into a studio photo, between his mother, who was leaning to the left, and his sister. His father sat on the right.

“It’s devastating,” Fred Wasserman, curator Mr. Miller’s 2016 donation to the Holocaust museum of documents, including letters and notebooks, said by phone. “This is an example where a picture says more than a thousand words.”

In 1944, when he was twenty, Norbert joined the British Army – believing it was the best way to find out what happened to his family after their correspondence ended – and Anglicized his name to Norman Albert Miller . As a sergeant, he was assigned to the intelligence division because he spoke fluent German, which explains why he found himself at the checkpoint in Hamburg.

After his discharge in 1947, Mr. Miller left England for New York the following year, taking a train to Toronto within a few days. In September 1949 he returned to New York. He worked for many years as a tool and die maker, mainly in the Bronx. In 1951 he married Ingeborg Sommer, who had left Germany with her family in 1938. She died in 1996.

In addition to his son Steven, Mr. Miller is survived by his son Michael and two grandchildren, one of whom is named Suzanna, to his sister.

Not long after the war, Mr. Miller learned in a letter from a friend who had survived the Jungfernhof concentration camp in Riga, Latvia, that his parents, sister and maternal grandmother had arrived there in late 1941. In March 1942, they were among the old and sick Jewish prisoners who were taken by bus and truck to a nearby forest on the outskirts of Riga, shot and buried in a mass grave.

Mr Miller and his son Steven traveled to Riga in 2013. They saw the remains of the camp and went to the forest. While they were there, Mr. Miller filled three vials with soil from the killing fields: one for him and the other two for his sons.

At Mr. Miller’s funeral in Paramus, N.J., his sons and other relatives poured soil from his vial onto the casket after it was lowered into the grave.

“It was unbearable,” said Mr. Wasserman, who attended the funeral. “The rabbi said he had never seen anything like it in forty or fifty years.”

In his eulogy, Steven Miller said the purpose of sprinkling the coffin with Riga soil was “so that those who were torn from him and never had a proper burial of their own can finally be prayed for and reunited and laid to rest become. with their son.”

Rose Dugdale, an Oxford-educated English woman who left a life of wealth to become a partisan activist fighting for Irish independence, in a career that included bomb-making, hijackings and art theft, died Monday in Dublin. She was 82.

Her death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by Aengus O Snodaigh, a friend and member of the Irish parliament. No reason was given.

Throughout the 1970s, Ms. Dugdale, whose family owned much of the London insurance company Lloyd’s, captivated the British and Irish news media with her exploits. Her story – like that of Patricia Hearst, another heiress who became a revolutionary and made news in the United States around the same time – fueled a narrative about glamorous, radical youth running wild in the post-1960s era:

Mrs. Dugdale repudiated her inheritance and liquidated her trust fund to support a variety of social and political causes. She and an accomplice were arrested in 1973 for stealing thousands of dollars worth of art and silverware from her parents’ home, with plans to sell it and give the proceeds to the Irish Republican Army.

Her father, Eric, appeared as a witness at her trial, and under British law she was allowed to cross-examine him herself – an opportunity she used to make political statements.

“I love you,” she told her father, “but hate everything you stand for.”

Nevertheless, the judge was lenient with her and imposed only a two-year suspended sentence because, he said, the likelihood of her breaking the law again was “extremely small.”

He was wrong. Immediately after her trial, she traveled to Ireland, where she and another accomplice, Eddie Gallagher, hijacked a helicopter and pilot to drop improvised bombs on a base of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the police force in Northern Ireland.

The bombs fell wide and failed to explode, and Ms Dugdale and Mr Gallagher went into hiding to plot their next move.

In April 1974, she and three other assailants burst through the doors of Russborough House, a palatial estate southwest of Dublin owned by Alfred Beit, a wealthy British politician and art collector.

They pistol-whipped Mr. Beit, tied him and his wife up and made off with 19 paintings by Gainsborough, Goya, Vermeer and other artists. Among the loot, worth a total of 8 million Irish pounds (about $110 million today), was ‘Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid’, one of only two works by Vermeer in private hands. (The other was at Buckingham Palace.)

Knowing they could not easily sell the famous works on the black market, Mrs. Dugdale and the other thieves demanded a ransom of 500,000 Irish pounds. They also demanded that Dolours and Marian Price, two IRA members jailed over a series of car bombings in England, be transferred to a prison in Northern Ireland.

After a nationwide hunt, police tracked down the art, and Mrs Dugdale, to a rural cottage in County Cork. This time she pleaded “proudly and incorruptibly guilty” and received a nine-year prison sentence. As she left the courthouse, she greeted the crowd with a clenched fist.

After being released from prison in 1980, she returned to Dublin where she worked as a community organizer to stem the rising number of heroin dealers on the city’s streets.

She also went back to work for the IRA, this time as a bomb maker. She and her partner, Jim Monaghan, developed a number of innovative weapons, including a projectile launcher that used two packets of McVitie’s Digestive Biscuits to absorb recoil, and a new type of explosive that was used in bombings in Northern Ireland and London, killing six people died and more than a hundred were injured.

Bridget Rose Dugdale was born on March 25, 1941 in Yarty, her family’s 600-acre estate in Devon, south-west England. Both her parents came from money: her father was a major shareholder in Lloyd’s and her mother, Carol (Timmis) Dugdale, was an heiress.

She grew up shuttling between the family estate and a sprawling house in London, between riding lessons and society balls. She attended Miss Ironside’s School, a private school for girls that also produced the model and actress Jane Birkin.

When she was 17, Ms. Dugdale joined 1,400 other teenage debutantes at a coming-out ceremony for Queen Elizabeth II. It was the last year that a two-century-old tradition was performed.

Mrs. Dugdale was a reluctant socialite and only went along on the condition that her parents hire a tutor to prepare her for admission to the all-female St. Anne’s College at the University of Oxford.

She studied politics, philosophy and economics there and counted the Irish writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch among the professors she met personally. Years later, as Ms. Dugdale faced a prison sentence, Ms. Murdoch wrote letters urging leniency.

She was by all accounts a mediocre student, partly because her growing interest in left-wing politics took up most of her time and energy. Among her many exploits, Ms Dugdale and a friend dressed up as male students and sneaked into a session of the all-male Oxford Union debating society, where they jeered and heckled in low voices.

After graduating in 1962, she studied philosophy at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, earning a master’s degree, then returned to Britain to study economics at the London School of Economics, where she earned a Ph.D.

Although Ms Dugdale worked as an analyst for the British government, she quickly became radicalized. She received a significant income from a trust fund and gave most of it away to anti-poverty programs around her apartment in Tottenham, an impoverished part of north-east London.

She came into contact with a self-proclaimed “revolutionary socialist” named Walter Heaton, with whom she committed the burglary of her parents’ home in 1973. While she received a light sentence, he was sentenced to six years in prison.

Ms Dugdale’s survivors include Mr Gallagher, whom she married in 1978 while they were both in prison, although they later became estranged, and their son, Ruairi Gallagher.

After the Good Friday Agreements largely ended violence in Northern Ireland in 1998, Ms Dugdale retired as a fighter. But she remained active in Sinn Fein, the political party for independence in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Although she was a divisive figure in Britain, in Ireland she became something of a legend, the recipient of awards and the subject of biographies and documentaries – most recently the feature film ‘Baltimore’ (2023), starring Imogen Poots as Mrs Dugdale. (The film was released this month in the United States, titled “Rose’s War.”)

“I did what I wanted to do,” she said an interview from 2011 before the Dublin Volunteers Dinner, where she was the first honour. “I am proud to have been part of the Republican movement, and I hope I have played my very small role in the success of the armed struggle.”

The executive director of Arkansas’ largest airport died Thursday after being wounded this week in a shootout with federal agents executing a search warrant at his home, authorities said.

Authorities say Bryan Malinowski, 53, director of the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock, shot at agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who then returned fire as they tried to carry out the attack. search warrant on Tuesday.

One ATF agent suffered a gunshot wound that was not life-threatening, authorities said.

In a 51-page statement released Thursday, officials offered insight into what led to the early morning search warrant in suburban Little Rock, which was criticized by Mr. Malinowski’s family as unnecessary and dangerous.

Authorities accused Mr. Malinowski of buying more than 100 guns in recent years and selling many illegally, including at least three that later turned out to be related to a crime. Mr. Malinowski first purchased the guns legally, checking a box on the purchase forms stating the guns were for himself, before selling them privately to private individuals, the affidavit said.

He would go to gun shows, the affidavit said, including two in Arkansas and one in Tennessee, and sell guns to people “without asking for any identification or paperwork.”

Photos in the redacted statement show Mr. Malinowski at a gun show, standing behind a booth full of firearms. The affidavit also states that Mr. Malinowski had sold weapons to two undercover police officers who were investigating him.

Mr. Malinowski’s family said in a statement released by their lawyer that they did not understand the government’s decisions, which “led to a raid on a private home and the use of deadly force.”

The family added that while they were “obviously concerned about the allegations in the affidavit,” they still believed the allegations “did not justify what happened.”

“At worst, Bryan Malinowski, a gun owner and gun enthusiast, was accused of selling privately owned firearms to someone who may not have had the legal right to purchase the weapons,” the family said.

The ATF did not immediately respond to calls for comment Thursday evening.

Arkansas State Police said in a statement that the results of an investigation would be presented to a prosecutor, who would “determine whether the use of deadly force was consistent with Arkansas law.”

Mr. Malinowski began working at Clinton National Airport in 2008 and became executive director in 2019, according to his biography on the airport’s website. He previously held leadership positions at other airports, including Fort Lauderdale, Florida; El Paso; and Lehigh County, Pa.

The Clinton National Airport said in a statement Thursday that under Mr. Malinowski’s leadership, “our airport has experienced significant growth and success, expanding the range of services and offerings to our community and state.”

Amnon Weinstein, an Israeli luthier who restored violins belonging to Jews during the Holocaust so that musicians around the world could play them in hopeful, melodic tribute to those silenced in the Nazi death camps, died on March 4 in Tel Aviv. He was 84.

His death in a hospital was confirmed by his son Avshalom Weinstein.

Mr. Weinstein was the founder of Violins of hope, an organization that provides violins he has restored to orchestras for concerts and educational programs commemorating the Holocaust. The instruments have been played in dozens of cities around the world, including Berlin, at an event celebrating the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

“Violins of Hope, it’s like a huge forest of sounds,” he said in 2016 PBS documentary. “Each sound represents a boy, a girl and men and women who will never speak again. But the violins, when played, will speak for them.”

There are more than 60 Holocaust-era violins in his collection.

Some belonged to Jews who carried them in suitcases to concentration camps and then had to play them in orchestras as prisoners marched to the gas chambers. Others were played to pass the time in Jewish ghettos. One was thrown from a train to a railroad worker by a man who knew his fate.

“I don’t need a violin where I’m going now,” the man told the worker, using Mr. Weinstein’s phrase. “Here, take my violin, so it may live.”

The son of a violin repairman, Mr. Weinstein worked in a cramped and dusty workshop in the basement of an apartment building on King Solomon Street in Tel Aviv.

“Walking in there was like stepping back in time,” said James A. Grymes, a music professor at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. wrote a book about Violins of Hope, said in an interview. “It really felt like you were in Stradivarius’ workshop: the smell of varnish, parts of violins everywhere. It’s like he was the Willy Wonka of the violin.”

One afternoon in the 1980s, a man with a tattoo identifying a prisoner on his arm arrived with a beaten-up violin who, like him, had survived Auschwitz.

“The top of the violin is damaged from being played in the rain and snow,” Mr. Grymes wrote in “Violins of Hope: Violins of the Holocaust – Instruments of Hope and Liberation in Mankind’s Darkest Hour” (2014). “When Amnon took the instrument apart, he discovered that it contained ash that he could only assume came from the crematoria of Auschwitz.”

Mr. Weinstein, who had lost hundreds of his extended family in the Holocaust, almost sent the man away; working on such an instrument seemed too emotionally charged. But eventually he repaired the violin, and the man gave it to his grandson to play.

Mr. Weinstein didn’t think much about working on Holocaust-era violins until the late 1990s, when he trained his son to be a luthier. The experience made him reflect on the role of violins in Jewish culture, from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to klezmer bands and the flying concerts of Itzhak Perlman.

“It was kind of a must for the young generation to learn to play the violin,” he said in the PBS documentary. “And if you have a violin, Friday or Saturday night, there was always someone who took it and played it.”

During a radio interview, he asked listeners to bring him instruments related to the Holocaust. Soon families began appearing in his workshop with violins stored in attics and cellars, each with its own haunting story.

Mr. Weinstein was particularly shocked by those recovered from concentration camps after the Allied invasion of Germany in 1945.

“This was the last human sound that all those people heard: the violin,” he said on the radio in 2016 interview at WKSU in Ohio. “You cannot use the name beauty. But this was the beauty of this time, these violins.”

Amnon Weinstein was born on July 21, 1939 in Mandatory Palestine and grew up in Tel Aviv. His father, Moshe Weinstein, was a musician and violin repairman. His mother, Golda (Yevirovitz) Weinstein, was a pianist and secretary in her husband’s workshop. They had emigrated from Lithuania in 1938, just as the persecution of Jews in Germany was escalating.

Mr. Weinstein grew up as a helper in his father’s violin shop. In his early twenties, he moved to Cremona, Italy – a city long known for its master luthiers – to study violin making. He continued his training in Paris under Étienne Vatelot, one of the world’s most renowned luthiers. In 1975, he married Assaela Bielski Gershoni, whose father was a Jewish resistance fighter during World War II, made famous in the 2008 film “Defiance.”

After his father’s death in 1986, Mr. Weinstein took over the family violin shop; ten years later he founded Violins of Hope. The first concerts with the violins from the collection took place in Turkey and Israel in 2008. Others followed in Switzerland, Spain and Mexico, as well as in Ohio, North Carolina and Virginia.

“Every concert is a victory,” he often said.

Musicians, especially Jewish ones, have described playing violins from the collection as a moving experience.

“It’s emotional for me because I’m not there to play this violin, I’m there to make it speak,” Niv Ashkenazia violinist who is a album with an instrument from the collection, said in an interview. “Our job as musicians is to just let these violins shine through.”

In addition to his son Avshalom, who plans to continue the Violins of Hope project, Mr. Weinstein is survived by his wife; two other children, Merav Vonshak and Yehonatan Weinstein; and seven grandchildren.

In 2016, Mr. Weinstein received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germanyone of the country’s highest honors.

During the awards ceremony, then German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke directly to Mr. Weinstein.

“Behind each of your priceless violins lies a human soul,” he said. “A human being persecuted, tormented and silenced by unimaginable violence and cruelty.”

Mr. Steinmeier told about the man who threw his violin out of the train. He described a prisoner who played the violin in Auschwitz.

“Each violin represents a person, Amnon,” he said. “And when you play violins, they represent six million people.”

Robert L. Barry, an American diplomat who was the chief American negotiator in reaching a major military agreement with the Soviet Union near the end of the Cold War, died on March 11 at his home in Newton, Massachusetts. He was 89 years old.

His wife, Margaret Barry, said the cause was multi-infarct dementia.

Mr. Barry led an American negotiating team at a security conference in Stockholm in the summer of 1986, when he and his Soviet counterpart, Oleg Grinevsky, reached an agreement on troop inspections that American officials saw as important in easing tensions between East and West .

The agreement stipulated that members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact would have to notify each other at least 42 days in advance if they planned military activities involving at least 13,000 troops or 300 tanks. In addition, any country planning military maneuvers involving 17,000 or more soldiers should invite countries that participated in the Stockholm Conference to observe.

“We have taken an important step toward reducing the risk of military confrontation,” Mr. Barry told reporters after the deal was concluded. The subsequent calm confirmed his comments.

It was the first East-West security agreement since the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty on Nuclear Weapons signed by Jimmy Carter and Leonid I. Brezhnev in 1979.

Mr. Barry had a photo in his bedroom depicting the celebratory vodka toast he shared with Mr. Grinevsky.

The Soviet Union was the main focus of Mr. Barry’s long career in the Foreign Service, which also included posts as U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria from 1981 to 1984 and to Indonesia from 1992 to 1995. In 1971, he became one of the first Western diplomats who were allowed to live as consular officers in what was then Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg.

In an unpublished memoir, he recalled that he was sometimes followed by the KGB as he drove through the city.

“As I often got lost,” he wrote, “there were a number of times when I had to turn around and retrace my steps, which caused considerable confusion among the followers.”

Later in life, Mr. Barry acknowledged that he had missed that era of binary opposites. “Some may find it strange that I am homesick for that simpler world,” with the threat of nuclear annihilation, he wrote. “Despite all that, I felt like I knew who the enemy was, and I felt confident that we understood how to contain the threat.”

Robert Louis Barry was born in Pittsburgh on August 28, 1934, the son of Louis and Margaret (O’Halloran) Barry. His father was a colonel in the Army Air Corps and the family moved from base to base during World War II.

Mr. Barry graduated from Lansdowne High School, outside Philadelphia, and then attended Dartmouth College on a Navy ROTC scholarship. He graduated in 1956 with a degree in international relations and a concentration on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and received a James B. Reynolds Fellowship from Dartmouth to study at the University of Oxford. While there, he traveled to Hungary’s border with Austria in an effort to help refugees during the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviets. He spent three years in the U.S. Navy before joining the Foreign Service in 1962.

In later years, in addition to his posts in Bulgaria and Indonesia, Mr. Barry served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from 1979 to 1981; chief operating officer for Voice of America from 1986 to 1988; and special assistant to Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who coordinated aid to Eastern Europe, from 1991 to 1992.

After retiring from the Department of State, Mr. Barry served as Chief of Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1998 to 2001.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter Ellen Barry, a reporter for The New York Times; a son, John Barry; and three grandchildren.

In an oral history for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Mr. Barry recalled the biggest moment of his career: when he negotiated the inspection agreement with the Soviet Union in Stockholm. It came at a time of personal tragedy for him and his wife Margaret, who had just lost their 20-year-old son Peter in a fishing vessel accident in Alaska.

Mr Barry went to Stockholm anyway and stuck to his mandate. “The idea that they should open their borders for on-the-spot inspection to see if there are any military maneuvers – or to check if there are any reports of where their troops were stationed or where their exercises were held – didn’t really appeal to people . them,” he recalled. “But we kept the pressure on.”

One of the last surviving survivors of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Richard C. Higgins, died Tuesday at the age of 102.

According to his granddaughter Angela Norton, he died of natural causes. She said he died in her home, where he lived.

Mr. Higgins was stationed as a radioman at Pearl Harbor Naval Base on December 7, 1941, when Japan launched a surprise bombing of the base. The airstrike killed more than 2,400 Americans and prompted the United States to declare war on Japan.

Mr Higgins, who later in life often spoke about his experiences to schoolchildren and on social media, described in an Instagram video from 2020 pushing planes away from each other as bombs fell around him.

“I moved planes away from the planes that were on fire because when the tanks exploded, they threw burning gas at the others,” he said.

In a oral history interview in 2008, he recalled being awakened by explosions and fleeing to the lanai, or porch, of his room. “I jumped out of bed and ran to the edge of the lanai and just as I got there, a plane flew right over the barracks,” he said.

The plane had “big red meatballs on board,” he said, referring to Japan’s rising sun insignia, “so there was no doubt about what was happening in my mind.”

Richard Clyde Higgins was born on a farm near Mangum, Oklahoma, on July 24, 1921, and lived through the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. He joined the Navy in 1939 and retired twenty years later, working as an aeronautical engineer.

Ms Norton said her grandfather placed an emphasis on sharing his story in his later years, especially with young people.

“He never thought he was a hero; the heroes were the ones who didn’t come home,” she said. “But he wanted to make sure their stories continue to be told, and that we remember what an incredible country we live in and the sacrifices they made for us to preserve our freedoms.”