Inge Elisabeth Engström

Emigrated to Sweden

Obituary: (in Swedish): https://www.fokus.se/2013/02/inge-engstrom/

Google translation:

Radio producer, died December 14, 94 years old.

Inge Engströms father earned his first million on producing brewer's yeast. He lost millions in the great stock market crash of 1929. He managed to fight back and get the business to flourish again. But the noose was gradually tightened around the family. Inge Engström could also feel it. When one evening she was no longer welcome at the prom. And when she was banned from her table tennis club. And when the guy she was in love with did not want anything to do with her, because she was Jewish. In March 1939 they fled from Nuremberg. The father had been to dinner with good friends and the city's police chief - the two were old acquaintances - had looked beyond to the health Inge's father that he would not go home that night. The police chief had namely just received an order to bring him and his family.

The father and son fled to London. The daughter Edit was sent to Basel in Switzerland. And Inge and her sister Marion ended up in a villa in Djursholm in Stockholm.

Her father had a promise from the banker Oscar Rydbeck to accommodate the girls with him. It ended the moment, without any money and without knowing the language. They did not like it. Their new hosts were not particularly fond of receiving guests. The girls were at the mercy of each other and cast firmly in their sibling roles. Even when the two were in the nineties, they were unmistakably big sister and little sister.

After two years, Marion had enough. She took the Trans-Siberian Railway to reach America via Vladivostok. Inge remained. She had already taken root in Sweden, sang with a choir in Uppsala and had a job as a translator at Bonnier Magazine All About Books.

Eventually she met sculptor Torolf Engström at a party, and the two became a couple. After the war they married and had children.

Music was always important to her. When she was a child, her family often spent time with musicians, and they often went to concerts. After she arrived in Sweden she closed in many ways the door of her own past. She never wanted to speak German. She never wanted to go to Nuremberg. She did not talk about what had happened. Maybe the music was thus even more important to her, as a pillar of her identity that stood where the second pillar split.

When her children became adult, she worked as a secretary at the Concert Company, which was one of the country's greatest artistic centers. Part of her job was to take care of the musicians who came and played, and Inge would simply invite them home for dinner. Often, it was about classical music superstars, and the events were always highly appreciated. Not that it was particularly posh dinners, it was black roots or stew, but touring musicians generally get too much of impersonal restaurants and hotels - this liked they came to a real home. They used to gather in a small piano room and play music together.

In the 1970s, she began working at the Swedish Radio music department. First as secretary to Ingemar von Heijne, but gradually she got several own producer information. She made »Nocturne« every weekday between 22 and midnight, and she chose poetry and music »Today's poem«, in that special way that makes you always wonder a bit how it fits together.

Inge Engström was also the one who "discovered« the Finnish conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen. The first time he conducted outside Finland, he was at Cirkus in Stockholm and conducted the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in a classical music concert series for children with Inge Engström behind. They must have liked collaboration, Salonen would then become the orchestra's chief conductor for a whole decade.

Inge Engström was often the events center, but she made sure to be there in a way that did not draw attention to her person. She was low-key. Since the 1990s, she devoted much time and commitment to the great music festival in Verbier in Switzerland that her son Martin founded. Many musicians who visited the festival have testified that there was something queen-like over her during the weeks that the festival was going on.