If the remarkable story of the women’s orchestra in Auschwitz-Birkenau is well known, it’s because so many of its surviving members were interviewed about it after the war, or penned memoirs. It was a lifeline thrown to a small number of the camp’s female prisoners – those who could play musical instruments, or sing. Some were professional, many more amateur, but all were regarded as “privileged” inmates.
Anne Sebba’s thoroughly researched book recounts how the orchestra came to be formed in 1943 (two years after the camp’s male orchestra was set up) and the stories of its members, deported from all around Europe, roughly half of them Jewish and half gentile Polish political prisoners. At times beset by internal frictions and rivalries, the orchestra nevertheless provided a sisterly sanctuary where these ad hoc musicians, thrown together by fate, helped each other endure hell.
They also gave Sunday concerts for the SS, who liked a bit of Mozart after a busy week carrying out the Final Solution
The orchestra was the brainchild of Maria Mandl, the sadistic supervisor of the women’s camp. This ambitious Austrian Nazi hoped to show off her cultural credentials to her superiors. In April 1943 she appointed Polish music teacher Zofia Czajkowska to lead the orchestra, with instruments requisitioned from the men. They played marches at the camp’s gates, to which the women labourers in their work squads had to keep time as they trooped out in the morning, and again as they trudged back half-dead in the evening. They also gave Sunday concerts for the SS, who liked a bit of Mozart after a busy week carrying out the Final Solution.
That August the orchestra got a huge boost with the arrival of the well-known Jewish violinist Alma Rosé, niece of Gustav Mahler. Mandl made Alma the new conductor, showed her great respect and even developed a fondness for her. Enlarging the orchestra from 20 to 40 and expanding its repertoire, Alma was exacting and authoritarian. But her sternness was not merely due to her high standards. She knew that any player discernibly not up to scratch would be expelled from the orchestra and sent to do hard outdoor labour, a likely death sentence. She saved lives.
Anita Lasker-Wallfish[Missing Credit]
Greek-born double bass player Yvette Assael[Missing Credit]
Dutch-born Flora Jacobs and her sister Rebecca Jacobs[Missing Credit].jpg?f=3x2&w=400&q=0.3)
French-born Monis Claire[Missing Credit]
The members occupied their own, somewhat more comfortable block, had better access to food, were not beaten by the guards, and if they fell ill were nurtured back to health rather than sent to the gas chamber. A place on the orchestra became so highly sought after that even those who’d never picked up a musical instrument now turned up to audition.
Some members wrestled with moral dilemmas: was it ethical to perform for the very Nazis who had murdered their friends and family members? Wasn’t it utterly humiliating for those being starved, beaten and worked to death to have to listen to cheery marching songs?
Others took a different view, recognising that the mellifluous concert music that occasionally wafted out over the death camp provided prisoners with moments of respite. As Margita Svalbova, a young Jewish medical student deported from Slovakia, put it: “When Alma played her violin, she took them with her beyond the barbed wire to a faraway world of beauty that had vanished for them.”
Today the last surviving member of the orchestra is Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who was its teenage cellist from Germany. She says she didn’t agonise over the moral issues in the camp, thinking only of day-to-day survival and “escaping into music”. The title of the film based on the post-war memoir of the orchestra’s singer Fania Fénelon sums it up well: they were all Playing for Time.
The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival
By Anne Sebba
Weidenfeld and Nicolson
