The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz

In 1943, German SS officers in charge of Auschwitz-Birkenau ordered that an orchestra should be formed among the female prisoners. Almost fifty women and girls from eleven nations were drafted into a hurriedly assembled band that would play marching music to other inmates, forced labourers who left each morning and returned, exhausted and often broken, at the end of the day. While still living amid the most brutal and dehumanising of circumstances, they were also made to give weekly concerts for Nazi officers, and individual members were sometimes summoned to give solo performances of an officer's favourite piece of music. It was the only entirely female orchestra in any of the Nazi prison camps and, for almost all of the musicians chosen to take part, being in the orchestra was to save their lives.

What role could music play in a death camp? What was the effect on those women who owed their survival to their participation in a Nazi propaganda project? And how did it feel to be forced to provide solace to the perpetrators of a genocide that claimed the lives of their family and friends? In The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, award-winning historian Anne Sebba traces these tangled questions of deep moral complexity with sensitivity and care.

From Alma Rosé, the orchestra's main conductor, niece of Gustav Mahler and a formidable pre-war celebrity violinist, to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, its teenage cellist and last surviving member, Sebba draws on meticulous archival research and exclusive first-hand accounts to tell the full and astonishing story of the orchestra, its members and the response of other prisoners for the very first time.

An important record of the incomprehensible cruelty perpetrated in Auschwitz, using music as an instrument of torture. But for those who played, it was a path to survival -- VICTORIA HISLOP

Anne Sebba is a historian and one of Britain's most distinguished biographers who began her career as a Reuters correspondent based in London and Rome. She has written eleven works of non-fiction, mostly about iconic twentieth-century women, which have been translated into several languages including French, Polish, Czech, Japanese and Chinese. She makes regular television and radio appearances and has presented two BBC radio documentaries about musicians. She is the author of the international bestseller That Woman, an acclaimed biography of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, and the prize-winning Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died Under Nazi Occupation. Her most recent book, Ethel Rosenberg: The Short Life and Great Betrayal of an American Wife and Mother, was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize. Anne is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research and trustee of the National Archives Trust. She lives in London.

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