From April 1943 until October 1944, an all-female orchestra
which was made up of prisoners performed in the women’s section of the
Auschwitz concentration camp. Its story has been told before – in film,
fiction, documentary and memoirs, but here historian Anne Sebba has produced a
magisterial and inevitably harrowing account of the orchestra and its members.
Formed by one of the most notorious camp guards, Maria Mandl (who was later hanged for war crimes), initially the orchestra had to consist of non-Jewish prisoners including Poles, Ukrainians and Russian prisoners-of- war, but as more and more Jews were sent to Auschwitz, many of whom had some musical training, it became a multi-ethnic group. For Mandl and other guards, its main function was to play rousing marches while the women who were being driven off for hard labour, were forced to keep in step. And as they played, the musicians’ instruments became coated with ash from the crematoria where the Nazis burned the bodies of their victims.
Inevitably, what they were doing made the orchestra unpopular with some other inmates. The musicians were given uniforms and extra food, which was obviously resented by those who were not so fortunate. They were also obliged to play for senior Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, and this made them suspect in the wider camp. And, because their skills were at a premium, even the Jewish orchestra members were not selected for the gas chamber. This complexity and the emotions it aroused in the players is at the heart of Sebba’s narrative, and gives it one of its main strengths. Many of the survivors’ memoirs have reflected the guilt they felt, and Sebba explores this, and the resentment of other inmates, with great sensitivity.
The second conductor, and for much of its existence the glue that held the orchestra together, was Alma Rosé. She was Gustav Mahler’s niece and a professional violinist. Ironically, because Mahler was Jewish, his music could not be part of the orchestra’s repertoire. She drove her musicians hard, but she also protected them, including those whose musical abilities were very slight. And when she died, in somewhat mysterious circumstances but probably from food poisoning, the orchestra members were at serious risk.
After D-Day and as the Allied forces approached Auschwitz, the Jewish members of the orchestra were moved to Bergen-Belsen. They no longer made music, but managed to remain as a mutually supportive group until the camp was liberated in April 1945 and the full horror of what had gone on in the concentration camps was revealed to the world. However, tellingly, all the survivors whom Sebba quotes say that the camps cannot be described – only those who endured them could ever really know what it was like.
As Sebba puts it, there are many moral conundrums at the heart of this story. Orchestra members had a choice – play and survive or refuse and die. In this book we can hear the voices of those who made the former choice. - Margaret von Klemperer
The Women’s Orchestra Of Auschwitz is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson: ISBN 978-1-3996-1074-2
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