An orchestra in hell

Early in 1943, Maria Mandl, the tyrannical, sadistic unofficial head guard at the women’s camp in Auschwitz, decided that the moment had come to form a women’s orchestra. Fiercely jealous of her male colleagues, she saw it as a rival to the several that already existed in the men’s camp. Its first leader was a thirty-seven-year-old Polish music teacher, Zofia Czajkowska, and by the summer its members included a professional drummer, a jazz singer and a banjo player, along with violinists, flautists and vocalists. The youngest was fourteen, the eldest in her fifties. But Czajkowska was not a trained conductor, and it was only with the arrival of Alma Rosé, the talented violinist and niece of Gustav Mahler, that the orchestra came together.

During her research into the story of the forty-three women who between the spring of 1943 and October 1944 played together in Auschwitz, Anne Sebba was able to interview its last two living members, the violinist Hilde Grünbaum and the cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. With their help, along with meticulous research into the testimonies left by some of the others and the many archives dealing with the Holocaust, she has fashioned a detailed picture of the orchestra’s players, the Poles, Czechs, Germans and French, with little in common except for their love of music and their capture by the Nazis.

The first members were all Poles, none of them Jewish. But as the trains from all over occupied Europe brought Jewish captives, among them renowned musicians, the orchestra grew and improved. Works by Jewish composers were forbidden – no Mendelssohn or Mahler – but arias from Rigoletto, Carmen and Madam Butterfly were popular, as were Tchaikovsky and Strauss. Mandl was not the only guard to view herself as a serious music lover, and successive camp commandants demanded concerts for visiting Nazi dignitaries or during the breaks between selecting new arrivals for the gas chambers. Sebba provides a chilling description of Adolf Eichmann, come to inspect his killing machine, demanding music to be played while he ate, then tossing his discarded chicken bones to the famished players. Dr Mengele was occasionally in the audience. Outdoor concerts, sometimes performed with ice thick on the ground, fingers numb with cold, took place against the stench of burning flesh, the ashes from the crematorium settling on the instruments.

Alma Rosé, about whom Sebba writes at some length, was a controversial figure, both much loved and criticized. Born in Vienna in 1906, she was by the time of her arrival in Auschwitz widely regarded as one of Europe’s finest violinists, but she was volatile, a disciplinarian, and she could be harsh. She was determined to make the orchestra as professional as possible and, though she lacked wind players, the instruments – brought to the camp by people who were immediately gassed – were superb. And she fought doggedly to improve the women’s living conditions, earning attacks for being too friendly with the guards. Though their rations were the same as those of other prisoners, the musicians lived and rehearsed in their own barrack, where they had bunks and mattresses to themselves, clean clothes and occasional showers. It was not always harmonious. Hungry and fearful, appalled by what they saw happening around them, the women could be quarrelsome. Friendships and enmities formed.

For each of them, there was a terrible moral question at stake, one that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. Since one of their duties was to play the other prisoners in and out of the camp, marching in orderly rows to Schubert’s Marche Militaire or Strauss’s Radetzky March to backbreaking and often lethal work, and to be there to lull new arrivals into feelings of false security, how complicit did it make them with the Nazis? How was it possible to play for people on their way to death? Yet none of the musicians were in any doubt that once they stopped playing, once the orchestra was disbanded, they themselves would be on their way to the gas chambers.

In April 1944, after attending a dinner for the birthday of a kapo, Alma Rosé fell ill and quickly died, probably of botulism, severe and tense to the last. The orchestra limped on under a former Soviet Army officer called Soja, who was a twenty-three-year-old singer and pianist, until November, when the Jewish members were sent to Bergen-Belsen. There they stayed together as best they could, surviving typhus, diptheria, TB and starvation until liberated by the British in April 1945. Some of the women left behind in Auschwitz were included in the infamous death marches across Germany to other camps as the Soviets advanced.

Sebba carries her tale on into the postwar lives of the musicians who survived – all but four of those she was able to trace having, remarkably, lived to see liberation. Many returned to find their entire families murdered and their homes gone. A few pursued musical careers. Others were too traumatized to listen to music at all. The pianist Fania Fénelon wrote a highly fictionalized memoir of the orchestra, later turned into a film with a screenplay by Arthur Miller. Mandl was hanged for her part in mass murder.

While writing her remarkable story, Anne Sebba, whose father, serving with the British Army, had reached Belsen soon after liberation, constantly asked herself how it was that the women in the orchestra had found the strength to go on living, a question often addressed by historians of the Holocaust. One or two, she concluded, were driven by a desire for revenge. Others were sustained by the music itself. Others again felt solidarity with the other women. And there were those who, like Primo Levi, believed it essential to tell the world what the Germans had done. As one of the musicians, a guitar player called Margot Anzenbacher, put it: “I must survive so that I can bear witness”. The author has done these women proud.

Caroline Moorehead’s most recent book is Edda Mussolini: The most dangerous woman in Europe, 2022

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