The Last Musician of Auschwitz review – an exceptionally moving film that will ring in your ears for years

The Guardian

27-01-2025

Auschwitz was a site of incomparable horror; people arriving at the concentration camp knew it would be hell on earth. So it was a shock to be greeted by a band playing Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Was this some kind of breathtakingly sick joke? A demonstration of German cultural superiority? A suggestion that the camp 'cannot be that bad', as one survivor recalls hoping? Or was it a sign, as another remembers thinking, that the Nazis really were 'crazy'?
The truth was complex and chilling, as Toby Trackman's exceptionally moving and intelligent documentary goes on to explore. The role of music in the Holocaust might initially seem a somewhat marginal topic. Is the fact there were orchestras at Auschwitz really that important in the grand scheme of things? Yes, as it turns out: because by examining the presence of music in the camp, The Last Musician of Auschwitz is able to give voice to a wealth of ideas about the function, value, inherent ambivalence and weaponisation of art and culture.
This documentary is named in honour of 99-year-old cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the only surviving member of the women's orchestra at Auschwitz. She was sent to the concentration camp as a teenager and, on her first day, was asked by another prisoner about her prewar life. When she said she played the cello, a conductor was summoned immediately. 'Here I was, stark naked, and she was asking me: 'Who did you study with?'' She laughs joylessly. 'It was somehow rather incongruous.'
The absurdity was impossible to ignore. As was the incomprehensible sadism: Lasker-Wallfisch was forced to play as her fellow prisoners were burned alive. While the orchestras were a lifeline for those who qualified, helping them avoid violence, starvation and the gas chambers, they also stripped music itself of meaning and feeling. When Lasker-Wallfisch was made to perform a piece by Schumann for the Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele – infamous for conducting twisted experiments on prisoners – she 'didn't feel anything. I played it as fast as possible and thought: get out.'
Elsewhere, there was something approaching logic. The Nazis wanted to annihilate Jews and other ethnic groups. They were also determined to turn Germany into an economic superpower. Music played into their repugnantly efficient combination of the two. Via the concentration camps, the Nazis had a valuable new resource; the slave labour of imprisoned Jews. In order to drill this free workforce with 'military-like efficiency', explains Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland in one of his many enlightening contributions, orchestras played marches as the prisoners walked to the factories where they were forced to toil. This film manages to weave in many other nauseating examples of how the Nazis financially optimised Auschwitz, including the selling of shorn hair and off-loading of charred human remains as fertiliser.
In Auschwitz, music became synonymous with heinous acts. Yet it also provided untold comfort. This documentary features many archive interviews from the late 20th century with unidentified Auschwitz survivors; these men and women – elderly, often glamorous, animated yet viscerally haunted – recall singing in groups to provide a flicker of morale and some semblance of identity. We hear of the Roma victims who sang about their experiences in the camps, and the 'bright and optimistic' lullaby secretly written by the Polish composer and prisoner Adam Kopyciński.
Music can make us feel human, but it is no guarantee of humanity. The German identity was tightly bound up with classical music, and German composers were a crucial source of national pride. An appreciation for high art is traditionally associated with civilised behaviour. Yet, observes Lasker-Wallfisch's son Raphael: 'There are many examples of these very cultured people doing the worst atrocities ever known to humankind.' In fact, German ethnocentrism informed their extermination of other cultures. As Freedland points out, the Holocaust didn't only kill millions: when it came to the European Jewry, the genocide decimated an entire cultural world.
The Last Musician of Auschwitz saves its most devastating story for last. We had been following the life of the Jewish writer Ilse Weber, and heard the heartbreaking song she composed for her elder son Hanuš after sending him to England via Kindertransport. Later, Ilse is nursing ill children in the Theresienstadt ghetto, soothing them with lullabies. When she and her younger son are transported to Auschwitz alongside her patients, she is given advice at the gates: tell the children to sing when they enter the gas chamber, then they will die faster and avoid being trampled by the adults attempting to escape.
Any worthwhile documentary about the Holocaust will force you to stare into the abyss; fewer are able to dig into cerebral ideas while unflinchingly documenting the atrocities carried out at the camps. This incredibly impressive programme does not let us forget about Auschwitz's corpse mountains or stench of burning bodies for a second, all the while posing questions about art and humanity that should ring in your ears for years to come.
The Last Musician of Auschwitz aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now.