It is unfathomable to imagine the worst place on Earth being a hub of creativity and musical talent. But there were 15 orchestras at Auschwitz, in which Jewish musicians played at the order of Nazi commanders, and many were also secretly composing in acts of personal resistance.
That “lost” talent is now revealed in two films marking 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz on Holocaust Memorial Day 2025. In Sky Arts’ The Lost Music of Auschwitz, British composer and musician Leo Geyer has formed a new orchestra to bring to life this forgotten music. And in the BBC’s The Last Musician of Auschwitz we hear the stories and testimonies of those who composed and were forced to play for the Nazis – including that of the last surviving orchestra member herself, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch – alongside new performances of their pieces.
It’s time we heard their music, says world-renowned historian of Holocaust music, Francesco Lotoro, who has spent the past 35 years researching it.
Recitals for Nazis: Francesco Lotoro
“It is as important as the life of every man and woman on this Earth; because, if in most cases this music has not saved the musicians who wrote it, I think this music will surely save us,” says Lotoro, who feels the music does not belong in the past. “This music has an unimaginable power. Listening to, playing, spreading this music shatters every consideration that we could have regarding camps; we have gone to take back our life where there was death and, where we have lost the physical life of the musicians, we have the only possible life left, that of the genius, of the intellect, of the heart. In a word, music.”
He hopes that this is just the start of the film world investing in this music, bringing future generations closer to this “most dramatically brilliant musical literature”.
“One day we’ll no longer have to refer to this music as ‘lost music of the Holocaust’; this is and will be ‘music’, because that’s exactly what its authors would have wanted. They wrote this musical testament; we are simply the executors.”
The Last Musician of Auschwitz probes the question of what music meant in the death camp. While for the Nazis it was simply entertainment – an interlude from the horrors they were committing, for prisoners it meant many other things.
Talented cellist: a younger Lasker-Wallfisch
For Lasker-Wallfisch it meant survival. Arriving at the death camp in 1943, the German 18-year-old mentioned her cello playing, heard the words “you will be saved”, and landed a role in the 40-strong Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t played her instrument for two years – they needed a bass instrument and those with orchestral places had a better chance of survival.
Polish composer Szymon Laks was one who created even in the most harrowing of places. Playing, with fellow Jewish musicians, a piece from a quartet he had composed (when music written by any Jewish composer was forbidden), an SS man appeared and asked what they were playing. Thinking fast, Laks said a little-known Austrian musician, and the satisfied officer walked off.
Songs are testimony of the heartbreak: a deathsong, or the gut-wrenching Weigela written by musician Ilse Weber to her two little boys, one of whom died with her in the gas chamber.
“The fact that there was music there at all is absolutely remarkable,” says Last Musician of Auschwitz director Toby Trackman. “Every person is going to receive the music in a different way, and it’s going to mean something different to everybody.”
Every dawn, inmates headed off to work to the incongruous soundtrack of fine musicians, as orchestras performed marches in temperatures as low as -5C at the beginning and end of each day.
Played for survival: Anita Lasker-Wallfisch
“Music was played to the most terrible things,” Anita said when she was freed in 1945.
They were also required to play concerts every Sunday and serve up pieces at the whim of the SS. When Lasker-Wallfisch was ordered by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele to perform Schumann’s Träumerei, she swiftly dispatched the tune without so much as a glance at the monster before her.
“When Mengele came in…it was one of my repertoire so I played the Träumerei. I didn’t feel anything. I played it as quickly as possible, and said ‘get out’,” she recalled. Her matter-of-fact approach mirrors that of other musicians in their memoirs and testimonies, says Trackman. “They all said other people have described the horror, so I’ll leave it to them. Anita was very pragmatic about that, but seeing what strength she took from having music in her life was very admirable.”
In a cinematic landscape populated with films about the Holocaust, Trackman’s intent was to make one that felt “different” and a “contribution”. He had also never visited Auschwitz before he spent a year going to and from the death camp to make the film. “I was very nervous about the idea of opening a box that I’ve tried to leave shut, for most adult life,” he says.
He grew up “culturally Jewish” in Bristol, and has a “distinct” memory of learning about the Second World War in his last year at primary school yet not learning about the Holocaust that took place in it. “We were only ten,” he says. “But I remember my family introducing that idea of, ‘Well, there’s this other bit of World War Two that you need to know about, and this is what happened to us collectively.’ From that moment on, it was a shadow that leaned over everything. I knew from a very young age the horrors and persecution experienced by and aimed at us and that has impacted on how I’ve gone about life in terms of my identity.”
Woven through his film are performances of musical works written by victims of the camp, filmed in the eerie shadow of Auschwitz today. Some of the performers were connected to the stories and creators themselves, including Raphael Lasker-Wallfisch, son of Anita, in the string quartet.
“The moment we were filming was particularly beautiful; although it was cold, it was very still and the sun was shining,” Raphael says. “It felt like I was connecting to many people who had perished there. When you when you’re playing, you are so absorbed in the music. But I think it was to do with the stillness and this sobriety of the moment that it felt totally different from any other kind of performance.”
“That, straight away, was very powerful,” says Trackman. “It was quite electric.”
“It was music that saved my parents, literally,” says Raphael, explaining that his father came from Breslau like his mother, and through his talents as a pianist was given a rare visa for talented children to go to Palestine in 1937, along with his mother and brother. “People could actually avoid going to the gas chamber by being busy with that. It is incredible.”
But also, music was psychologically protective. “Being a musician, your daily dealings with music and culture actually does protect you from many traumatic, inward thoughts. It certainly kept my mother to this very day.” Singing Ilse Weber’s emotional Wiegela was Liv Migdal, who had met Ilse’s surviving son Hanus when her own mother Ulrike Migdal was researching the story.
She had been told by Hanus that the way she interprets Ilse’s music is how he imagined his mother to sound.
“So it was really special to have her singing Ilse for us, knowing that she’d had that sort of blessing from him,” says Trackman.
“A lot of people were very aware – everybody on camera and behind the camera – of the privilege and how special these moments were.”
While there were strict boundaries in place for recording the performances, including not being able to perform within the walls of the camp, they could play within the grounds of the house that belonged to commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss, the chilling focus of Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest.
“There was a real power in reclaiming some of those spaces in that way, even just momentarily, like when we installed the grand piano in the garden of the commandant’s house and took it over for the evening and played at night in front of the walls of the camp,” says Trackman.
“That felt a really powerful experience for everybody.”
There, by the commandant’s house, Lotoro performed the lullaby Kołysanka, written by the Polish pianist, composer and conductor Adam Kopycinski in Auschwitz. After replacing Franz Nierychło as conductor of the Lagerkapelle, Kopycinski had done his best to ensure that his musicians were freed from forced labour, and under his conducting the orchestra grew to its peak size of 120 members. “Playing a short but intense piano work written in Auschwitz in the shadow of what was once the camp commander’s lodgings was priceless,” says Lotoro. “On the evening of the recording, the BBC documentary crew were there, and for filming purposes I played the piece several times; I felt that we were all living an experience that went far beyond the documentary, as if that piece of music purified that place.”
Soundtrack to horror: Philippe Graffin, Simon Blendis, Elizabeth Lasker-Wallfisch and Raphael Lasker- Wallfisch at the camp. The quartet played a work by Szymon Laks.
The academic had never imagined performing this music he has spent his life recovering and promoting. “Playing at Auschwitz a work written in Auschwitz means freeing for ever that fragment of life that every musical page carries with it. It is said in Hebrew, ‘Bemotam zivu lanu et hachaim’, which means ‘with their death they have commanded us life’.
One day, playing this music may also be a pleasure of the soul but today it is a duty, a mission, an ethical choice, a political and democratic act.”
The Last Musician of Auschwitz is on BBC2 on January 27
