The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival

Biographer Sebba (Ethel Rosenberg) offers a nuanced and unsettling exploration of the role music played at Auschwitz. The camp’s all-female orchestra was the pet project of brutal camp leader Maria Mandl, who thought it would lend her “gravitas” in the eyes of Nazi higher-ups. From early 1943 to late 1944, the orchestra grew to over 40 members under the fierce and controversial leadership of conductor and internee Alma Rosé, a famous violinist (and Gustav Mahler’s niece) who expanded it to fit as many Jewish women as possible, pushing against orders to keep it majority non-Jewish. In Sebba’s telling, Rosé was a lonely, angry, and complex figure who would scream at musicians for a false note and stay up all night writing out music from memory. While she could be cruel, acceptance into her orchestra meant salvation from the gas chambers. The book quickly dispatches any romantic notion that music somehow transcended the camp’s horrors—quite the opposite, as the musicians had to play cheery marches while fellow prisoners hobbled off to horrific, often fatal working conditions (“madhouse music... a damned rhythm of fear,” one survivor called it) and play the classics for SS guards who used music to “recharge emotionally” (noted one musician, “One moment they want Schumann’s Träumerei, the next moment they are putting people in the fire”). It’s a chilling account of the sublime being twisted to inhumane ends. (Sept.)