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In 1940, 52-year-old composer Rosy Wertheim saw her new piano concerto performed in The Hague. That May, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands.

Within two years, Wertheim’s rights – and the rights of her fellow Dutch Jews – would be severely curtailed, then eliminated entirely. Initially this meant relocating Jewish musicians to the back rows of the storied Concertgebouw Orchestra. But by May of 1941 it meant firing them outright. (By 1944, the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s harpist, Rosa Spier, was imprisoned in Theresienstadt.)

In late 1941, the Nazi Kultuurkamer was established in the Netherlands. In order to work, artists, actors, authors, and musicians were forced to pledge written loyalty to the Nazis. Censorship would follow if deemed necessary. Wertheim subsequently withdrew from music entirely and escaped to the countryside, where she went into hiding. She was unsure if she’d ever emerge.Rosalie Marie Wertheim was born on 19 February 1888 in Amsterdam, the eldest of Johannes and Adriana Wertheim’s four children. Johannes was a stockbroker, and the family was wealthy and well-respected. The Wertheimpark, the oldest park in the city, was actually named after her grandfather Abraham. (It is now the location of an Auschwitz memorial, constructed of broken mirrors and containing the cremains of Holocaust victims.)As a child, Rosy hated practicing the piano (she “preferred improvising”). That led to an interest in composing, but she quickly ran into a brick wall, realizing that she’d need extensive training in harmony and theory in order to give full voice to her musical ideas. Perhaps consequently, as a teenager, her professional ambitions didn’t lay so much in the direction of music; instead, she decided she wanted to become a social worker, or at least pursue some kind of career that would involve caring for the poor. But her parents dissuaded her (“they didn’t want me to be confronted with unpleasant things,” she said), and they opted to send her to a boarding school in Neuilly, France, where she continued her piano lessons.

But her fascination with fixing society’s ills proved more than just a teenage phase. After she returned to Amsterdam, she attended the School of Social Sciences and enrolled in a two-year program where she learned about poverty and politics. She also continued studying music, and composed. Wertheim soon discovered that she could combine her two great passions by using music to improve the lives of the marginalized. She taught piano to poor children and conducted choirs made up of singers from disadvantaged (and often Jewish) neighborhoods. “These activities were most satisfying because I could ventilate my musical talent and my social inclinations,” she later remembered. “It was a big workload but it gave me great fulfillment, also because my musical friends supported me.”