The words “music” and “Auschwitz” clash like a pair of giant brass cymbals. What role could the former, which soothes the soul and moves the spirit, possibly have in one of the most savage and brutal killing machines ever devised in history?
That is the question most often put to me when I tell people I have been writing about a women’s orchestra which played inside Auschwitz on a twice-daily basis – and which saved the lives of its 50 or so members, ranging in age from 14 to 56.
The Nazis liked having marching bands to make the inmates go off to work in a disciplined formation of rows of five, partly to make counting them easier. Also, they hoped to try fooling the world that these places were military-style work camps, not industrial-scale extermination camps.
Most prisoners who arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau, having been stuffed into cattle cars on trains from a wide swath of Europe, were gassed on arrival, especially if they were Jews or other minorities, elderly (anyone over 40) or children. Some were taken for medical experimentation, which also resulted in their deaths.
But many of the young and fit deportees were retained in order to work in one of the many sub-camps which the Nazis set up around Auschwitz itself. These prisoners were cruelly treated and often died from forced labour, cold, hunger, beatings, mistreatment, exhaustion or from diseases brought back into the camp.
So the Nazis tried to encourage the myth that the labouring prisoners were well looked-after by establishing orchestras. It was a perversion of music, an additional instrument of torture used in almost all their camps to bend the prisoners to their will.
Yet even though several camps had a variety of male orchestras – in Auschwitz, there was a big symphony orchestra and even a jazz band, the latter especially surprising since the Nazis banned jazz as degenerate music – there was only one all-female band in any of the camps, prisons and ghettos set up by the Germans.
The person behind the establishment of a women’s orchestra in Auschwitz was Maria Mandl – a well-educated Austrian-born guard who wanted to seem cultured in order to impress her Nazi lover. At first, the only prisoner she could find to run it was a Polish Christian teacher, Zofia Czajkowska, who had managed to persuade Mandl that she was related to the great composer Tchaikovsky.
Sensing this might offer an opportunity for survival, Czajkowska knew a few Polish folk tunes by heart and recruited a handful of friends to play them. But it was hardly an orchestra, and she struggled to maintain discipline.
So when Mandl discovered Alma Rosé, a formidable Austrian violinist and the niece of the composer Gustav Mahler, imprisoned in a different part of the camp, she rushed to put her in charge. Rosé doubled the size of the orchestra – since the Nazis insisted it had to be approximately half Christian, half Jewish – letting it be known in all the blocks and incoming transports that there was a tiny chance of survival for those who could play an instrument.
Since many more applied than could be taken on, including several who played the piano or mandolin and some who had only basic level recorder, Alma included copyists and singers to save more lives.
The orchestra desperately needed a bass instrument – so when 17-year-old Anita Lasker, a talented cellist – arrived, she was told immediately: “You will be saved.”
Being known in the camp as “the cellist”, rather than just a number, restored her humanity and improved the orchestra greatly.
The women’s orchestra, a ragtag band of 11 nations, was not sent out to work during the day but instead practised for almost eight hours, inbetween the outdoor marching sessions. In return for playing well, they had their own block, an individual bed and underwear and they were allowed to grow their hair.
Hardly privileges, but enough to make them resented by some of the other women prisoners. The real boon of playing in the orchestra was that they were not selected to be killed in the gas chambers which, for Jewish women, was the likely outcome of being in Auschwitz. Alma Rosé told her girls constantly that if they did not play well, they too would “go to the gas” and used the strictest discipline to ram the point home.
Many of the SS officers relished the opportunity to listen to music and Alma was ordered to play solos at Sunday concerts, sometimes lasting three hours, as well as to play for sick prisoners in the infirmary. Only the best musicians accompanied her for these concerts.
Occasionally, individual Nazi offers would come into the music block and demand a private performance. Anita Lasker, now 99, recalled how “Josef Mengele would come into the music block and demand the Träumerei of Schumann, a beautiful and soothing piece. I played it as fast as I could so he would leave”.
Anita insisted to me that her reason for mentioning this story was not to humanise her captors but to show that human beings, even when they are musically educated can still be monsters. As her friend, the German violinist Hilde Grünbaum, commented: “You can’t make sense of what they did. Who can understand these people? One minute they want Schumann’s Träumerei, and the next they are putting people in the fire.”
Equally bizarrely, Alma Rosé managed to persuade the Nazis to provide a grand piano for a few weeks to help with copying out the different parts for the unbalanced range of instruments she had. She also said she needed it to teach her musicians their parts in an operatic quartet from Rigoletto, normally performed by two men and two women, not four women.
After nine months in charge, Alma herself died in mysterious circumstances – probably food poisoning – on April 5, 1944, aged 37. After her death, the orchestra dwindled and although it was strengthened by the addition of Hungarian musicians now arriving, many women thought that the ever-increasing madness, as the Nazis made preparations for the Hungarian mass deportation, had driven Alma into a deep depression before she died.
Lily Mathé, who arrived in July 1944, was a particularly talented Hungarian violinist who had conducted her own troupe of musicians pre-war and might have stepped in as conductor. But instead, the Nazis recruited a Russian pianist Soje “Sonia” Vinogradova who lacked the authority and charisma of Alma. The women returned to playing only marches.
Suddenly, at the end of October 1944, once the Nazis realised the Russians were approaching and wanted to expunge any remnants of their appalling crimes against humanity, the Jewish members of the orchestra were told to swiftly remove their clothes and instruments and put on rags again; they were being sent to another camp inside Germany, Bergen-Belsen.
There was no time even to say goodbye to their Christian colleagues in the orchestra, who remained for a further two months until they were forced to undertake a death march to Ravensbrück in the freezing cold with little food.
In Belsen, the 20 or so Jewish musicians soon realised that they had simply swapped one hell for another. Although Belsen was not set up as an extermination camp, conditions were so appalling that former orchestra members Julie Stroumsa and Lola Kroner, having survived against the odds in Auschwitz, now died, succumbing to the rampant disease, lack of food and overcrowding.
Anita, Hilde and the others held out until the camp was liberated by the British on April 15, 1945, a date the survivors called their new birthday.
But since most of the women had no papers, no family and no homes to go to, leaving Belsen to start new lives in the post-war world was to prove another torment, another story.
Today, as the world commemorates 80 years since the liberation of the camps, there is only one survivor from the women’s orchestra, Anita Lasker, 99, left to speak for all her comrades. I feel privileged to have met her and to honour the memory of all the others who played their hearts out in order to survive.
- The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival, by Anne Sebba (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £22) is published on March 27