THE WOMEN'S ORCHESTRA OF AUSCHWITZ

Eyewitness accounts of survivors’ sufferings.

The musicians of the women’s orchestra in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp were required to play marches as exhausted, starving female prisoners left for and returned to camp after a day’s hard labor. They also played concerts for the infirmary, guards, and visiting Nazi dignitaries. Thus, they were forced to provide the aural backdrop to the ghastly murders of 1.1 million (mostly) Jews, gassed or dead from torture or starvation. Sebba, a British author, delves into the biographies of the musicians and their conductor, Alma Rosé, “descended from German musical royalty,” based on memoirs and survivor interviews conducted by the Shoah Foundation. Crucially, she tells the story not only of the players, but also of their audience of fellow prisoners. “How could we play light music here, against the background of the flames and black smoke that billowed day and night from the crematoria chimneys?” reflects one survivor. The author leaves open the question of whether the music helped prisoners or intensified their suffering. She makes clear, however, that the orchestra did not play during the “selection” of poor souls sent to the gas chambers. The players’ musical skills saved at least their own lives, exempt from the work squads, though they themselves were exhausted and starving, and Jewish orchestra members were always vulnerable to “selection” for gassing. Their resident block was mere meters from a crematorium, and human ashes settled inside some of their instruments. They experienced the “scandal of music at Auschwitz on a daily basis,” as the Nazis’ abuse of music was itself “a form of torture.” Their playing was an “effort to claw back something of what it meant to be human.”

An important and heartbreaking contribution to Holocaust history.