In the 1920s and 1930s, Paul (Pál) Hermann performed as a cellist all over Europe. Adolf Weißmann wrote in the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag: ‘Paul Hermann is one of the best cellists of our times.’ A Dutch newspaper called him ‘the Hungarian Casals’. ‘A cellist of first magnitude’, according to the Evening Standard in London. He not only played the music of Bach and Beethoven to great critical acclaim, but also championed both Hungarian and Dutch contemporary composers. The fact that Hermann – student of Leo Weiner and Zoltán Kodály – was also a gifted composer himself, was far less known. His first compositions date from his student time at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, the last compositions that we know of were written late 1939 in Paris, two months after the Second World War broke out. In 1944, Paul Hermann was arrested in Toulouse and deported via Drancy to Lithuania. He never returned.