In the camp, zeki with a kitchen knife cut a piano keyboard for her. And at night she played this silent instrument of Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin. The women from the barracks later assured that they had heard this silent music, just watching her eradicated work on the woods with their fingers and face.

The daughter of the French and Spanish teachers of the Paris Sorbonne University, Vera Lothar studied in Paris with Alfred Cortot, then at the Vienna Academy of Music. At the age of 12, she made her debut with an orchestra led by the great Arthur Toscanini.

Being a well-known pianist who gave solo concerts in many countries of the world, she married Soviet engineer Vladimir Shevchenko and in 1937 came with him to the USSR. Vera rushed to the NKVD and started shouting, confusing Russian and French words, that her husband is a wonderful honest man, a patriot, and if they do not understand this, then they are fools, idiots, fascists and then take me... And Vera Lotar-Shevchenko will have thirteen years to roll the forest. He learns about the death of his husband in a camp and two children in the blockaded Leningrad.

He was released in the Lower Tagil. And right from the station, in a drunk camp telogreek, the last force ran late in the evening to the music school, wildly knocking on the door, begging for "permission to approach the piano"... to... to "play a concert"...

She was allowed. At the closed door, not daring to enter, the teachers cried off. It was clear where she came from in the drained telogreek. I played almost all night. I fell asleep behind the instrument. Then, laughing, she said, “And I woke up as a teacher of that school.” For the last sixteen years of her life, Vera Lotar-Shevchenko lived in Akademgorodka near Novosibirsk.

She will not only recover from the camp as a musician, but will also start active touring activities. Tickets for the first concert were not sold. The places here were intended for those with whom she shared the terrible years of camp. He came, meaning he was alive.

The fingers of Vera Augustovna for the rest of her life were red, crusty, nodular, squeezed, degraded by arthritis. And also - the wrongly grown after they were broken in the interrogation ("not in a hurry, taste every blow, handle a gun") by the senior investigator, Captain Altukhov. She remembered that name all her life and never forgave him.

Vera Lotar-Shevchenko died in Novosibirsk in 1982. Her own phrase is written on her grave: "The life in which Bach is blessed."