The Violin Built Behind Barbed Wire
War is often remembered through enormous things: armies moving across continents, aircraft filling the sky, cities reduced to rubble.
But sometimes its most powerful stories survive inside much smaller objects.
In this case, that object is a violin built from bed slats, table legs, discarded cartons and glue scraped from prison-camp furniture.
Its maker was First Lieutenant Clair Cline, an American bomber pilot whose life changed in February 1944 when his B-24 was shot down over the Netherlands. Cline survived, but German forces captured him and sent him to Stalag Luft I, a prisoner-of-war camp near Barth, Germany, that held Allied airmen.
Fighting an Enemy Called Hopelessness
For prisoners of war, survival involved more than finding enough food or staying warm. The men also faced long stretches of boredom, uncertainty and helplessness.
Because Cline was an officer, he was not assigned regular labor. That left him with countless hours inside the camp and very few ways to fill them.
He began carving wooden models, including a replica of the B-24 in which he had been shot down. The work gave his hands and mind something to concentrate on, but eventually he wanted a greater challenge.
Cline had grown up around music and woodworking. He had received a violin as a child, and his experience as a carpenter gave him an understanding of how wood could be shaped, repaired and transformed.
While imprisoned, he decided to attempt something that should have been impossible.
He would build a working violin.
Making an Instrument from Almost Nothing
There was no workshop inside Stalag Luft I. Cline had no professional tools and no supply of carefully selected tonewood.
He used whatever he could find.
Wood came from the slats beneath prisoners’ beds, table legs and aid cartons. Cline shaped the pieces using a penknife, shards of broken glass and a table knife that had been ground into a crude chisel.
Other prisoners helped him collect hardened glue from chairs and tables. They scraped it away, boiled it and reused it to hold the violin together.
The work required extraordinary patience. Each curve had to be formed by hand. Every part had to be adapted from material never intended for instrument making.
It took approximately four months to complete the violin.
Somehow, the finished instrument did more than resemble a violin.
It played.
Music on Christmas Eve
Cline completed the instrument in time for a concert inside his barracks on Christmas Eve in 1944.
He drew the bow across the strings and played for the men imprisoned around him. One of the songs associated with that Christmas performance was “Silent Night.”
For the prisoners listening, the sound would have carried meanings far beyond the music itself.
It reminded them of home.
It reminded them of families waiting thousands of miles away.
Most importantly, it proved that their captors had not taken away their ability to create something beautiful.
The violin became well known within the camp. Other prisoners remembered seeing it and hearing its story, and it came to represent the ingenuity men used to preserve a sense of purpose under terrible conditions.
The Violin Comes Home
Stalag Luft I was liberated near the end of the war, and Cline brought his handmade violin back to the United States.
From October 1945 through September 1946, the instrument appeared in a traveling exhibition about prisoner-of-war life. More than four million Americans saw it, and professional musicians played it at several stops along the tour.
Cline later worked as a cabinetmaker and continued making stringed instruments. Music became a lasting part of his family’s life.
His son became a professional bassist. His grandchildren included professional orchestral musicians, among them National Symphony Orchestra violist Jennifer Mondie. Cline even built instruments for members of his family, connecting the skills he had relied upon in captivity with the generations who came after him.
Clair Cline died in 2010, but the violin survived him.
Today, it belongs to the collection of The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, where it is preserved as an artifact of captivity, creativity and resilience.
More Than a Violin
Judged by traditional standards, Cline’s violin should never have worked.
Its wood came from prison furniture. Its glue had already been used once. Its maker worked without a proper bench or professional tools.
Yet that is precisely what makes it so meaningful.
It was never merely an instrument.
It was a declaration that even behind barbed wire, a person could still imagine, build and create. It gave frightened and exhausted men a sound that belonged to something beyond the camp.
Clair Cline could not control the war raging outside or determine when he would return home.
But he could take the broken and discarded materials around him and turn them into music.
References
The National WWII Museum, “Stalag Symphony: Clair Cline”
The National WWII Museum, “Lt. Clair Cline’s Violin: From the Collection”
The Washington Post, “National Symphony Orchestra Violist Plays Heirloom Built by Grandfather”
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