Zhanna Arshanskaya Dawson(1927-2023)
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Zhanna Arshanskaya Dawsonwas a Russian-American pianist, Holocaust survivor and faculty member of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University (Bloomington). In 1941, Dawson and her family were living in Kharkov when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and began to strategically and brutally kill Jews. Her family was murdered, but she (together with her sister Frina) survived the Holocaust. The Arshanskaya sisters wound up in a United Nations refugee camp at the end of the war. There, an American camp administrator, US Army Lt. Laurence Dawson heard the girls perform in a variety act. He got them aboard the first ship of Holocaust survivors after the war. The girls were sent to Crozet, Virginia to live with Larry Dawson's wife, Grace. Through connections he was able to obtain an audition before Ernest Hutcheson, Rosalyn Tureck, and Muriel Kerr of the Juilliard School of Music, which offered them scholarships to attend. In 1947 Zhanna Arshanskaya and Larry Dawson's brother David, a violist, were married. They moved to Bloomington, Indiana in 1948, where she began to teach music at Indiana University and he played in the Berkshire String Quartet. Dawson died at the age of 95.