Percy Haid Selected Music and Home Movies

Percy Haid, b. Riga, Latvia 1913-d. Chicago 1977. Composer and musician active in the Kovno ghetto. Haid performed and arranged music for the Ghetto Orchestra, and played piano and accordion at the ghetto's "coffee house," the Cafe Monika. His original song "Mamele" (The Old Mother), written in the wake of a Kinderaktion, became widely known in Kovno and other locales; his symphonic poem, Fantasie in Gelb (Fantasy in Yellow), sketched out in Kovno and reworked in Dachau, was broadcast over German radio soon after liberation. Haid met his future wife Sonja Pessin while in Dachau; they arrived in the US in 1947 and settled in Chicago, where Haid relaunched his musical career. He is perhaps best known as the composer of the hit song "I Remember When," recorded by Eddie Fisher in 1952.

Sonja Haid Greene (Siauliai, Lithuania) was born to a Jewish family and after the war immigrated to the United States.