Fénelon, who later wrote the book The Musicians of Auschwitz, was essential not just in arranging the music, but for inspiring the younger members by reading their fortunes with tarot cards. But Sebba’s book is not about any one individual. After all, around 50 women performed in the orchestra. “What I’m trying to do is show the whole orchestra,” says Sebba. “It’s not about Alma, amazing though she was; it’s not about just Anita, although she was pretty important as the only cellist; it’s not about Fania, who was invaluable and inspired them that there will be a life again. It’s not just about Hilde, who was a leader.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch at home in London, 2024, for The Last Musician of AuschwitzBBC/Two Rivers Media/Toby Trackman
"I’m looking at the sisterhood that helped people pull together and the small acts of kindness. It was because they were a team that they survived.” What Sebba was keen to explore was how one could survive “in a hellhole like Auschwitz”, where they’d seen their parents or younger siblings murdered.
“Why would you want to live?” she asks. “You’re freezing cold, you’ve hardly got any food. You have to get up almost at dawn and play. And at any moment, the Nazis might decide to kill you. What would give you that rod of steel to carry on? I’ve spent lots of time thinking about it, and I think it’s the solidarity between them all.”
The Nazis exploited music at the camps. For them it was entertainment – an interlude from the horrors they were committing – and they could demand performances at their whim.
But to be an inmate invited to join the orchestra was to be granted a better chance of survival. It meant slightly better living conditions: underwear, a toilet, a bed so they could sleep. Although the real privilege it afforded was hope, says Sebba.
“They were allowed to be slightly more human, but it was just enough to give them hope. That enabled them to feel there was a life beyond this.”
The musicians in the orchestra knew that many of their fellow prisoners detested them and thought they were very privileged. “I think anyone who survives Auschwitz to an extent is doing the bidding of the Germans,” says the author, referring to what Primo Levi called “the grey zone” – the moral ambiguity of the situations faced by prisoners within concentration camps. “Arguably it’s the worst crime of all, because it’s making the prisoners do the Nazis’ bidding. But I see it as an act of resistance, because you’re surviving, which is not what the Nazis wanted.”
Music at the camp was certainly not an enjoyable creative endeavour for the musicians themselves.
There was no choice. The first thing Lasker-Wallfisch told Sebba was that it wasn’t really music. “She said it was ‘ghastly’ music. She said, ‘Schubert’s Marche Militaire is the one tune I can’t bear to hear.’”
However, occasionally the music provided a temporary chance to ignore the gloom of their surroundings. In her book, Sebba quotes Hélène Wiernik recalling how the “intelligent and cultured” Fénelon would recite books or French poetry, momentarily distracting them. There were also concerts on a Sunday, which offered up the reward of hearing Rosé play.
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Every day the orchestra played while their fellow inmates were sent to work. This was an orchestra in which only a handful of the musicians were professionals; the rest had a more rudimentary musical history. Yet they were required to perform in a marching band for an hour at the beginning and end of working days at the camp, sometimes in freezing temperatures. The four or five professionals would have to carry the many others who were just about able to beat time.
“That’s not much,” says Sebba. “So, it was a perversion of music. It was using music as an instrument of torture. And every so often, Alma would reward them with Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, and then they could dream, perhaps. But otherwise, music saved them because it gave them a focus. It gave them an activity during the day, which was hard, but it wasn’t a demolition squad or bashing bricks down. There was a collaborative effort to it.”
For Sebba, who grew up in Surrey as Anne Rubenstein, the Holocaust has “always been there”. As a historian, she had studied it, and her work has touched on the subject – most recently on a book about women in wartime Paris, for which she went to Ravensbrück, the Nazis’ only all-women camp.
She had always wanted to write about the Holocaust “because I just feel it’s the central, terrible black hole of the last century. I almost feel you can’t call yourself a historian without dealing with it.” And yet, not being the daughter of a survivor left her feeling that she could not do it. What gave her the “permission” was discovering her father’s story. She had always known that her father, who was a British tank commander, had been in Belsen, but he had never talked about it, and he was no longer alive. Eventually, her son said, “Isn’t it about time you researched your own father?”
“When I finally did, I found that he had been there at the very time that the orchestra were giving a concert.”
Sebba learnt to play the piano as a child, but had stopped playing. When she started this book three years ago, she took piano lessons to try and understand how difficult it would be to meld teenagers who may have had two years at school learning the recorder into playing for an orchestra. She realised that the most crucial thing was the ability to keep time.
“A lot of the mandolin players or violinists were just told to come in on the downbeat. And that was Alma deliberately rescuing as many people who had tiny knowledge. Imagine you’re playing for your life. Learning the piano, I have realised it is really hard to play in time. It has given me an appreciation for how tough this is.”
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Renowned historian and author Anne Sebba Dain Rhys Evans
Her extensive research involved seeking the books or pamphlets written by orchestra members, and she discovered that people’s memories varied widely in the absence of diaries. She also looked to the US Yad Vashem Library and the Shoah Foundation that Steven Spielberg set up after making Schindler’s List, including “amazing” video testimonies. “You just put in orchestra or music, and you have these powerful videos beamed into wherever you’re working with women in their 80s and 90s, many of them still unable to talk about it without breaking down,” she says.
She also went to Auschwitz to walk in the footsteps of her subjects. She had been to several concentration camps in the name of work, including Buchenwald when she was writing on Daniel Barenboim and his East West Divan Orchestra. But she had never been to Auschwitz.
“I didn’t want to go because I thought it was a tourist place that I could imagine. And I was so wrong. Auschwitz is unlike anything else.
"So, I would urge everybody to go. Once you’ve seen it, I don’t think you can get it out of your mind.”
Sebba’s book ends on April 15, 1945, when Belsen was liberated. The most significant moment of the story comes close to that date, when the Nazis sent Jewish members of the orchestra to Belsen in November 1944 with strict instructions to board the train. Disobeying her orders, Grünbaum returned to the music block and took some of Alma Rosé’s notebooks and the bag she’d sewn from an old shirt to carry the music. She could have taken practical items such as food or warm clothing.
“Much more sensibly, she took things that are now in Yad Vashem to prove to the world this really did happen. How could she know in 1944 that there might be Holocaust deniers? She had the foresight and the courage to disobey Nazi orders and to look after these things throughout the war. If I had to pick one moment that is so extraordinarily meaningful, that’s it.”
It’s significant that it is the 80th anniversary, she says, not least because there won’t be any living voices for the next big one. “It is incredible that there was an orchestra, that there was a grand piano in a killing field, that although they were trying to kill Jews, they preserved this group of Jews. I’m just pleased that I’ve been able to write it while there are still living witnesses.”
The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival by Anne Sebba is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Anne Sebba is speaking at the Cambridge Literary Festival on April 26, cambridgeliteraryfestival.com
