History / Wars & Conflicts / World War II / Biography & Autobiography / Women
In 1943, German SS officers in charge of Auschwitz-Birkenau ordered that an orchestra be formed among the female prisoners. Almost fifty women and girls were drafted into a band that would play marching music to other inmates, forced laborers who left each morning and returned at the end of the day. While still living amid the most brutal of circumstances, they were also made to give weekly concerts for Nazi officers, and individual members were sometimes summoned to give solo performances. For almost all of the musicians chosen to take part, being in the orchestra saved their lives.
What role could music play in a death camp? What was the effect on those women who owed their survival to their participation in a Nazi propaganda project? And how did it feel to be forced to provide solace to the perpetrators of a genocide that claimed the lives of their family and friends? In The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, award-winning historian Anne Sebba traces these questions of deep moral complexity with sensitivity and care.
From Alma Rosé, the orchestra's main conductor, niece of Gustav Mahler and a formidable pre-war celebrity violinist, to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, its teenage cellist and last surviving member, Sebba draws on meticulous archival research and exclusive firsthand accounts to tell the astonishing story of the orchestra, its members, and the response of other prisoners for the very first time.
