The Most Beautiful Sounds Next to Silence

​Weinberg was born on 8 December 1919 to a Jewish family in Warsaw. His father, Shmil Weinberg  a well-known conductor and composer of the Yiddish theater, moved to Warsaw from Kishinev, Moldova (at that time a part of the Russian Empire) in 1916 and worked as a violinist and conductor for the Yiddish theatre Scala in Warsaw, where the future composer joined him as pianist at the age of 10 and later as a musical director of several performances. His mother, Sonia Wajnberg (née Sura-Dwojra Sztern, 1888–1943), born in Odessa, Russian Empire (today part of Ukraine), was an actress in several Yiddish theater companies in Warsaw and Lodz. The family had already been the victim of anti-semitic violence in Bessarabia – some members of his family were killed during the Kishinev pogrom. One of the composer's cousins (a son of his father's sister Khaya Vaynberg) – Isay Abramovich Mishne – was the secretary of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Baku Soviet commune and was executed in 1918 along with the other 26 Baku Commissars.

Weinberg entered the Warsaw Conservatory at the age of twelve, studying piano under Józef Turczyński, and graduated in 1939. Two works, his first string quartet and the Berceuse for piano, were composed before he fled to the Soviet Union at the outbreak of World War II. His parents and younger sister Esther, who remained behind, were interned at the Łódź Ghetto and were subsequently killed in the Trawniki concentration camp.