Longtime Newton resident Werner Gans owed his escape from Nazi Germany as a 13-year-old to his cello and cherished the instrument throughout his life.
As Adolf Hitler directed the persecution of Jewish people like Gans, his musical talent offered a way out. He studied cello in Milan, performed with a symphony in Cuba, and moved to Boston to attend a music conservatory as a scholarship student.
Gans died in 2012 at age 89, but now his cello, along with its bow and other artifacts from his life, have been donated by his family to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
The museum recently announced the acquisition, completed last year, in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday. This year’s commemoration marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945.
Gans’s son, Steve, said his father walked through life with his cello.
“He played it his whole life,” said Gans, 64, who also lives in Newton. “The cello was a gate opener.”
Lori Gans, Steve’s wife, said her father-in-law would be honored to know that his cello and some of his other belongings have joined the museum’s collection.
The cello, she said, is a “very special artifact from his life that was in so many ways symbolic of his escape” and his role in securing safe passage to the United States for his parents and sister.
“He always expressed nothing but gratitude for his life,” she said.
Fred Wasserman, an acquisitions curator for the museum, said it’s unusual to find an instrument transported out of Nazi Germany by a Jewish refugee.
“It’s all quite wonderful that it survived,” he said.
Werner Gans was born in Mannheim, a city in southwestern Germany in 1923. He began studying violin at age 6 and took up the cello four years later.
His parents, Moritz and Bella, owned a chemicals business known as Fabrik Ganss, but the Nazis’ rise to power cost them the company and threatened their lives.
Overnight, classmates began chastising Gans at school and his father’s passport was seized because he crossed the street on foot against a red light, according to a 2006 Globe story.
In 1936, when Gans was 13, his parents sent him to live with a family in Milan to study music. The following year, the couple was jailed for violating the Nazis’ anti-Jewish laws. They were sanctioned for establishing a firm with a Christian name to facilitate business for their company, and later, they were forced to sell the enterprise for a fraction of its value.
Gans and his family left Europe in October 1938 and sailed to Cuba aboard the SS Orinoco. Gans joined the Havana Symphony Orchestra, where music continued to create opportunities for him.
A pianist in Cuba recommended Gans to Joseph Malkin, a cellist who directed a music conservatory in Boston. In February 1939, Gans, then 16, traveled alone to the city to study as a scholarship student.
Before his departure, he inscribed a note in German on a piece of music he composed and titled “Consolazione.”
“Dedicated to my beloved parents before my departure for the U.S.A, Havana 19 Feb 1939,” Gans wrote. The composition was also donated to the museum.
World War II erupted seven months later. After the United States joined the conflict in 1941, Gans said he was initially classified as an “enemy alien” by a draft board in Massachusetts, according to the transcript of an interview he gave decades later to the National Park Service.
Yet in 1943 as Gans was about to make his debut with the Boston Pops, the draft board changed course.
He was stripped of “enemy alien” status and drafted into the US Army. With his German language skills, Gans landed at Fort Ritchie in Maryland, where he undertook a mission that he kept secret for most of his life.
Gans trained in military intelligence with a group of soldiers who became known as “Ritchie Boys.” Many were Jewish refugees who helped gather battlefield intelligence by interrogating German prisoners.
Gans spent some of the war on Long Island in Boston Harbor, where he interviewed German officers and enlisted men who had been captured in and around Paris after US forces liberated the city in 1944.
In his interview with the National Park Service, Gans said he told some of the German soldiers about his past.
“I said, ‘I happen to be a German Jew who was pushed out of Germany. I have relatives who were killed by the Nazis,’” he told them, according to the transcript.
Gans didn’t reveal to others that he had been a Ritchie Boy until after a documentary about the program came out in 2004.
Photographs of him as a Ritchie Boy were also donated to the museum as was a mercury thermometer from his family’s company in Germany. In Massachusetts, Moritz and Werner Gans operated another business, Gansolin Chemical.
Gans was discharged from the military in 1946. He didn’t pursue music professionally but played with the Newton Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Civic Symphony. At Temple Beth Avodah in Newton, he performed the Kol Nidre on the cello, a musical composition to mark Yom Kippur, his son said.
Steve Gans said he has memories from childhood of his father practicing the cello on Sundays in the living room.
“I can still hear the warm-up song,” he said. “That was a ritual that was calming and beautiful.”
Laura Crimaldi can be reached at laura.crimaldi@globe.com. Follow her @lauracrimaldi.