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Telegraph
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The extraordinary story behind the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz
Anne Sebba's impressive book on the women who formed an orchestra in Auschwitz is subtitled 'A Story of Survival': and that, paradoxically, was the problem for many who played in it. They were not sent to the gas chambers at the whim of the camp authorities; their musicality gave them a use to the Nazis that, in most cases, saved their lives. Some had survivors' guilt, but for others the will to live overcame all else. All seemed to have been affected by the exploitative way that the women's orchestra (there was one for men too in their camp) was deployed; and many other inmates could not reconcile themselves to what these musicians did to oblige their captors. It had three main duties. One was to play marches as slave labourers left the camp in the morning and as they returned at night, staggering with exhaustion and sometimes carrying the corpses of comrades who had dropped dead that day. The second was to play music as the transports of inmates, mostly Jews and mostly destined for immediate extermination, arrived in cattle trucks at the disembarkation ramp. During the selection process for slave labour or death the orchestra played, a cynical ploy by the SS to make the condemned think that in arriving at a place where music was played things could not be too bad. This, especially, horrified the players. The third was to give private concerts and recitals for their music-loving guards, who despite working amidst the utmost wickedness and depravity liked to pose as civilised consumers of culture (or perhaps, for some of them, it was a distraction from the horror happening around them). Dr Mengele, when not experimenting on pregnant women, was partial to an operatic duet, and Rudolf Höss, the commandant, liked an aria from Madama Butterfly before going off to select more victims. On Sunday nights the orchestra would give concerts of up to three hours for the SS. It disgusted the musicians: but their utility was all that kept them from death. The orchestra was far from entirely Jewish. Several Poles played in it and, later, Russian women prisoners of war. Indeed its conductor for much of its existence, Alma Rosé, an Austrian violinist who had toured Europe and had an international reputation, was under constant pressure to keep the quota of Jews in the ensemble down. Rosé is one of the foremost heroines of this book. She was the niece of Gustav Mahler, and her renown meant she was welcomed by her captors on arriving at the camp, and put in charge of the orchestra. She used her superior musicianship not merely to raise the standards of playing and performance, but to school members of the orchestra to a point where their positions were safeguarded and the risk of their being removed from the orchestra and sent to their deaths had been eradicated. To achieve this she often resorted to harsh words, and sometimes to beating those who she thought were not trying: not because she was, like their guards, a brute, but because she was desperate to save their lives. Eventually the strain became intolerable for her. She died in April 1944, not directly murdered, but of some form of poisoning, possibly botulism. Sebba also says that some thought she might have been suicidal, or that a jealous inmate had poisoned her (Rosé and all the musicians had privileges about their dress, food and accommodation, but Rosé had more than most, and some felt she ingratiated herself with the guards). In the months after her death it proved hard to hold the orchestra together, there being no-one else who had her discipline and range of musical talents. Yet as the Russians advanced and the German defeat became inevitable, it ceased to matter. In October 1944 the Jews in the orchestra were sent to Belsen; the non-Jews left shortly before the Russians reached the camp in January 1945, going to Ravensbruck and other prisons in Germany. Despite the hideous conditions and the rampant disease in Belsen, and the winter 'death marches' back to Germany, many of the orchestra survived. Sebba tells the story of their post-war lives; some earned a living through music, others never touched an instrument again, and some could not even bear, for years, to hear music at all. Among the vast testimonies published about Auschwitz there have been a number of books, and documentaries, about the orchestra. Not only does Sebba appear to have read most of them – published or unpublished – and have seen or heard the recorded material, but she managed to interview the last two survivors: Hilde Grünbaum, who died in 2024 shortly after her 100th birthday, and Anita Wallfisch, the distinguished cellist who co-founded the English Chamber Orchestra, and will celebrate her 100th birthday in July. Sebba's command of detail is superb. She quite rightly outlines the atrocities of the sadists, psychopaths and savages whom Auschwitz seemed to attract like a magnet; but also the resilience and courage of a group of women who refused to be beaten by evil, and used music to save their lives.
The Independent
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Books of the month: What to read this March from a twisty thriller to Julian Barnes on changing your mind
Anne Sebba's The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is a tale of endurance, revolving around the inspirational force of music and the sheer power of small acts of kindness. The book, a well-researched study that includes first-hand accounts about surviving Nazi death camps, is also a testimony to the strength of female solidarity in the most wretched circumstances. As one of the musicians puts it: 'Who can understand these people? One moment they want Schumann's 'Träumerei', the next moment they are putting people in the fire.' One of the more unusual books out this month is Willow Winsham's The Story of Witches: Folklore, History and Superstition (Batsford). Witches are believed to have helped stop Napoleon from invading England; in his book, Winsham notes that thousands of witches across the United States 'took part in a ritual against president Donald Trump' in 2017. Maybe spells just ain't what they were. The best reissues of March include Faber's paperback editions of three classic Samuel Beckett novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. In the new introduction to Molloy, Colm Tóibín reminds readers of Beckett's ability to mix the tender and the savage in his writing, as well as his penchant for providing 'less than wholesome' humour. The autobiography, novel and non-fiction books of the month are reviewed in full below. ★★★★☆ Lucy Mangan's Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives is the follow-up to the journalist's 2018 release Bookworm: A Childhood Memoir and picks up as a sort of ongoing autobiography from her teenage years. The choice presented to adolescent girls in the 1980s, she writes, was to be placed in the 'bimbo box' (aiming to be attractive to boys by being 'pretty, booby, acquiescent') or the geeky box and endure 'the awkward teenage years for the bookish' as a result. Elsewhere, The Guardian TV critic offers interesting thoughts on how GCSE curricula can damage children's relationship with literature; she provides a solid defence of 'guilty-pleasure reading', including of Shirley Conran's 1982 novel Lace, a scandalous 'bonkbuster' of its time. I'm pretty much in agreement with Mangan about the value of escapist fiction, although we have different tastes. For example, she admits to being one of many adults who loved the Harry Potter books, confessing that when she worked at the Bromley Waterstones she waited 'as eagerly and impatiently as any of our child customers' for the next instalment in JK Rowling's series. Bookish also deals with reading when you are pregnant (can she be alone among expectant mothers who were given a copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting and then hurled it across the room?) and ends with lockdown – 'when books saved me'. Most touching are the moments in which she recalls her late father (who died in January 2023) and her memories of how he used to buy her treasured books. Bookish is certainly for the bookish – an affectionate, warm guide to the healing power of reading. 'Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives' by Lucy Mangan is published by Square Peg on 13 March, £18.99 ★★★★★ Colin McCann's Apeirogon was one of my books of the year for 2020, so I approached Twist with high expectations. They were not misplaced. His new novel, about an Irish journalist and playwright called Anthony Fennell and his assignment to write about the underwater cables that carry the world's information, is simply stunning. Fennell travels to Cape Town to board the Georges Lecointe, a cable repair vessel captained by chief of mission John Conway, a mysterious and reckless freediver who repairs shattered fibre-optic tubes at unfathomable depths. When the mission falters and Conway disappears, Fennell tries to find him in what becomes part thriller and part exploration of narrative and truth. (There are deliberate echoes of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.) The other main character is Conway's estranged wife Zanele, an actor and ocean lover who offers some stark views on what is happening to the waters that Conway inhabits. She tells Fennell that four billion tons of industrial waste is being dumped in the sea every year. 'If this was happening in a f***ing sci-fi movie, we'd get it, but we don't,' she says. 'If we had any sense, we would all die of shame.' There are vivid descriptions of the sea ('everything gets filtered out except the blue, it's like being in a Miles Davis song,' says Conway) and of the drinking that has wrought such damage on Fennell's complicated private life. Twist is a truly thought-provoking novel about truth, the universal propensity to 'misdirect' when it comes to our own character, and the shoddiness of the web age and what Fennell calls 'the obscene certainty of our days'. It is hard not to conclude that whatever benefits technology brings, internet connection comes at the price of human disconnection. The 21st-century human seems a very broken thing in Twist. And McCann's novel, penned by a brilliant storyteller at the height of his powers, has a disconcerting ability to help you simultaneously find and lose your bearings. 'Twist' by Colum McCann is published by Bloomsbury on 6 March, £18.99 Non-fiction book of the month: Changing My Mind by Julian Barnes ★★★★☆ Fellow oldies past their prime will surely offer a nod of recognition at Julian Barnes's ruminations on 'how memory degrades'. It arrives in the Memory section of Changing My Mind (a collection of essays partly broadcast on radio a decade ago), in which Barnes explains how he has altered his opinion over the years and now believes that 'memory is a feeble guide to the past'. Late in life he now believes, like his philosopher brother as it happens, that a single person's memory is no better than an act of the imagination when it is uncorroborated and unsubstantiated by other evidence. Changing your mind is a running theme across the book's four other sections – Words, Politics, Books and Age and Time – which are all provocative and entertaining. The section on politics is perhaps the most revealing. Barnes, who was born in 1946 and who remains one of Britain's finest modern novelists, writes that the only time he voted Conservative was in the early 1970s, when it was a choice between Edward Heath and Harold Wilson. He also offers an amusing account of what would happen in 'Barnes's Benign Republic'. Among his pledges are a 50-year ban on any Old Etonian from becoming prime minister and turning at least one royal palace into a museum of the slave trade. Barnes offers a sane, sardonic guide to the world and demonstrates why it is beneficial to have flexibility of thought. He changed his mind about the merits of author EM Forster, for example, after reading a delightful description of a breakfast Forster was served on a boat train to London in the 1930s: 'Porridge or prunes, sir?'. The book is perfect for a reflective hour or so of reading. Although it is slight (57 pages in a small octodecimo format), less is definitely more with Changing My Mind.
