At Bein & Fushi’s Rare Violins on Michigan Avenue, you can find dozens of fine violins. Some have been re-strung or repaired, while others have been completely restored. But there is one violin in this shop that is kept under lock and key away from the others.

Click image to view gallery

“Every time I take it out of the safe, it goes directly into a case that we carry it around in,” says store owner Geoffrey Fushi.  “And I must say that we are generally not that careful with others.”

The violin was made by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu in 1741, and is named after one of its former owners: Henri Vieuxtemps, a 19th-century Belgian composer.

The Vieuxtemps violin has been played by some of the greatest virtuosos in history, including Eugene Ysaÿe and Yehudi Menuhin. Today, it is owned by a London banker who has asked Fushi to find a buyer for it.

Fushi remembers the owner’s instructions: “‘I’m considering entrusting my violin to you to sell. Now my violin is the greatest one. So I think it really merits an impressive price.’”

And what is that “impressive” asking price?  A whopping $18 million.

But for the elite group of musicians who have been fortunate enough—not only to handle the Vieuxtemps but to actually play it—its incredible value doesn’t seem to shake their confidence.

Click image to view gallery

Sang Mee Lee, a native Chicagoan and violinist with the Beethoven Project Trio, has had the opportunity to play the Vieuxtemps several times.

“As an artist, as a player, you honestly don’t think about the price, the value, whatever,” Lee says. “You’re most interested in the sound and the beauty of the tone….the beauty of the craftsmanship.”

Lee played the Vieutemps at Fushi’s shop two weeks ago, and was once again taken aback.

“It may sound a little corny, but these violins have souls. They absolutely do.  And this violin, it carries something,” Mee says, cradling the violin. “It’s from another world.”

That magical quality has driven high-tech efforts to unlock the centuries-old secrets of the violin. Earlier this year, a team of scientists at Northwestern Memorial Hospital helped to analyze the instrument’s craftsmanship by taking CT scans of it along with three other rare violins. The scans measured the overall outline of the instrument, thickness and density of the wood, and details about the curves of the front and back plates.

But some violin experts are doubtful that instruments like the Vieuxtemps can ever be recreated.

“Science can do so much, and tell us so much, but it can’t really supplant art,” says Stefan Hersh, a violin dealer, professor and director of the orchestral program at Roosevelt University. He once worked for Fushi tracking rare violin prices, and says the reason the Vieuxtemps is the most expensive violin in the world right now is because it’s up for sale.

“Suffice it to say that among the violins that it would be grouped with, any of them that would trade would set a world record. Maybe almost every time they would trade,” Hersh says. “So the most valuable instrument is the one that traded last, in a sense. And when this one trades again, it will probably be for a certain length of time the most valuable one until another in that very, very narrow group of the best instruments in the world trades again.”

Click image to view gallery

Hersh says it’s difficult to judge whether or not the Vieuxtemps is in fact the greatest violin ever made, but nevertheless he says it is one of the best.

“It’s among the best violins in the world. I would love to have it. I don’t have $18 million in spare change lying around, or even $17.5 million to make an offer,” Hersh says. “But I would love to have such a violin. That’s a thrilling object.”

Fushi says he’s seen some interest shown in the violin, but his true hope is for the instrument to stay right here in town.

“I’d love to have it end up here in Chicago, and displayed at the Art Institute, have it played six or 10 times a year for important performances,” Fushi says. “Usually music lovers wouldn’t say that, but it really deserves to be preserved and played by the greatest artists.”

An estimated 1.7 million Cambodian citizens died under the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979.  It has taken almost 30 years to bring those responsible for the atrocities in the killing fields of Cambodia to justice.  But a legal landmark was reached today.

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, also known as the ECCC, is the tribunal responsible for trying senior members of the Khmer Rouge.  Today, the court handed down a guilty verdict for the former director of Cambodia’s notorious Tuol Sleng prison.  Kaing Guek Eav, known as “Comrade Duch,” was accused of overseeing mass torture and executions at the prison, resulting in the deaths of more than 14,000 people.

The tribunal proceedings are being closely monitored around the world, thanks in part to the efforts of a number of Chicagoans.

Leon Lim survived the Khmer Rouge regime of the late 1970s, and remembers the first night soldiers took over in April of 1975. “At midnight, four soldier[s] came to my house and asked [if] any member[s] of my family were member[s] of the old government or soldier[s] of the old government.  At that moment, my life changed forever,” says Lim.

In April of 1975 Lim was a 22-year-old medical student living in Cambodia’s capitol, Phnom Penh.  But with the Khmer Rouge takeover, the entire population was forced into farming labor camps.

“Every day that I work in the camp there, I see how they tortured people. Sometimes I see [a] whole village disappear,” he recalls.  “The whole village disappeared. They executed them all in one night and dumped all the bodies in an old bombed crater,” he says.  “I didn’t know if I would be the next one executed. Every time I see somebody approach me, a soldier approach me, I’m worried I’ll be the next person to be executed.”

After surviving more than three years and eight months in the labor camp, Lim set out for his village to find his family but it was too late.

“My parents and the rest of my siblings were executed by the Khmer Rouge.  That’s the moment…it’s hard to describe it because every time I talk about it, I start to break down. Can you believe that your parents and siblings [were] all executed? It’s really hard. At that moment, my life changed forever, again.”

Almost 30 years after leaving his home country, Lim visits the only memorial to victims of the genocide outside of Cambodia.  It rests inside the Cambodian American Heritage Museum on Chicago’s North Side.

Lim helped build “The Wall of Remembrance,” as it was known in 2004.  80 glass panels, each inscribed with nearly 25,000 names, represent the almost 2 million people who perished under the Khmer Rouge’s regime.

For the families of those who lost their lives in the killing fields, the memorial serves as a place of healing.  But for many, the search for closure continues in the special court chambers in Cambodia.

Set up through a joint partnership of the United Nations and the Royal Government of Cambodia, the special courts were created to try the senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge, such as “Comrade Duch,” the director of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison.

“It is absolutely impossible to bring justice to 1.7 million victims and their families who have survived.  That’s just impossible,” says Northwestern Law professor David Scheffer.  “But, I think by bringing the senior leaders to account, we not only achieve some measure of justice but also help embellish and strengthen the historical record in Cambodia, because these trials produce an enormous amount of evidence and testimony, and all of that becomes part of the historical record.”

But when Illinois State Senator Jeff Schoenberg visited Cambodia in 2006 on a fact-finding mission, he was stunned by what else he learned about the tribunals.

“Standing in that open tribunal hall – I asked the representatives of the United Nations who were leading the tour if they were going to be showing the Khmer Rouge leadership tribunal on the internet.  I just assumed that they were going to.  And I found out that there were no plans whatsoever, largely out of budgetary constraints,” says Schoenberg.  “And it immediately sparked my thinking that this is a very powerful story that needs to be told…not just within Cambodia, but throughout the world.  We had all witnessed a genocide where people needed to be held accountable for their actions.  And certainly, when I came back, I was determined to set about making something happen.”

He did that by securing funding from the JB & MK Pritzker family for a website – the Cambodia Tribunal Monitor — and by enlisting the help of David Scheffer, who is also Director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University.

“I think it’s a fantastic demonstration of how here in the depths of America and Chicago, we actually have created a very, very strong link to a judicial development in Cambodia. And frankly, we’re at the forefront of it,” says Scheffer.

Scheffer served as Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues under former President Bill Clinton and was instrumental in helping to set up the Cambodian war crimes tribunal.

“It takes time – international justice,” he says.  “There’s always impatience in the international community, but these are huge crimes – they require a lot of investigation.  They go after very senior people, and I think justice has been long delayed in Cambodia — but finally it will not be denied.”

The site itself is intended to track all of the developments, jurisprudence and related events surrounding the Cambodian genocide court proceedings.

“It’s not only the only place in the world where you can watch the trial proceedings…but you can also access all the relevant documents for the trial.  There are blogs and guest essays from international legal scholars and human rights advocates,” emphasizes Schoenberg.  “It really has become a focal point for stimulating more thinking and greater awareness about this atrocity so that the proceedings would be transparent, and so that the lessons of what occurred during this genocide would be learned and not repeated.”

And for survivors like Lim, it is another way to honor those who lost their lives — by sharing their stories with the world.

“The trial, even though it takes a long time to establish and to finish, it’s worth something for the Cambodian people. It’s worth something.”

Inside a small classroom in the basement of St. James Presbyterian Church on Chicago’s North Side, a centuries-old language is finding new voice.

Once a month, about 30 people gather here to learn to speak their families’ native language of Ojibwe.

It’s a language that has been in danger of being lost.

“The native languages are dying,” says Dr. Dorene Wiese, President of the American Indian Association of Illinois.  “Most of the languages are taught or spoken by older people, so the younger people aren’t learning.”

For the last 40 years, Weise has worked in the American Indian Community, focusing much of her efforts on reviving her ancestral language.

The Ojibwe Indians — also known as the Chippewa — are among the largest group of Native Americans in North America, with about 150,000 in the U.S. alone.

“Some people say this is our renaissance.  This is our recovery.  Where we are beginning to not be afraid to bring out our languages, our religion, our culture, our music and our dance — and share it with other people,” says Weise.

As part of the workshop, the association’s drum group performs a popular Pow Wow dance known as the Jingle Dress Dance Song.

Children learn about animals through arts and crafts. And in this case, by matching animal paw prints to their Ojibwe names.

Families are encouraged to attend the classes together, so that they can learn the language and speak it with one another at home.

Sarah Jimenez, who studied the Ojibwe language at a school in Canada, is using this class as a place to practice what she learned years ago.

“If you don’t use it, you lose it, Jimenez says.  “So I’m re-integrating it again into my everyday language.  If I see an elder — there are few elders here — I’ll actually say ‘hi, how are you?’ And my pronunciation is kind of loose and they help me with that,” she says.

Because the language was traditionally passed on orally from person to person, it was never written down, so today it is being taught phonetically.

For example, “Waaboozoonhs” is the Ojibwe pronunciation for the word meaning “rabbit.”

Of the approximately 3,000 Ojibwe Indians in Chicago, there are only five fluent speakers — and Georgina Roy is one of them.  She’s also one of only two Ojibwe language teachers in Chicago.

“Our ancestors, they suffered.  They suffered so much to bring us this language, and how could we not honor our elders and not speak our language?” she says.

Part of that suffering, says Weise, came in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, when American Indian children were taken out of their homes and forbidden to speak their native language.

“In the United States, communities had their children taken away from them and put into boarding schools,” says Lenore Grenoble, Linguistics Professor at the University of Chicago.  “Those children were punished for speaking their languages in the boarding schools, and this has been one of the most horrific things that has happened to Native American languages.”

Grenoble, who has studied shifting and endangered languages for more than 15 years, says it’s critical to revitalize a language before it becomes endangered.

“Seriously endangered languages on the brink of extinction have only a handful of elderly speakers,” Grenoble says.  “So if you want to revitalize it, you’re much better off catching it when some of the children still speak it.”

And that’s why linguists like Grenoble and educators like Wiese say the future of languages such as Ojibwe rest with the children who learn to speak it today, and they in turn can pass it on to generations to come.

“It’s important because it’s the foundation of our history,” says Wiese.  “Because it’s not written, it’s recorded in the stories — not only of our families but of our people and our relationships with other tribes and the U.S. Government.  These are embedded in the words and the language.”