Anne Sebba’s remarkable book draws on real-life interviews with survivors of a group that saved them – but not without a cost. 

Anita Lasker-Wallisch, a surviving member of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz Credit: BBC

Anne Sebba’s impressive book on the women who formed an orchestra in Auschwitz is subtitled “A Story of Survival”: and that, paradoxically, was the problem for many who played in it. They were not sent to the gas chambers at the whim of the camp authorities; their musicality gave them a use to the Nazis that, in most cases, saved their lives.

Some had survivors’ guilt, but for others the will to live overcame all else. All seemed to have been aected by the exploitative way that the women’s orchestra (there was one for men too in their camp) was deployed; and many other inmates could not reconcile themselves to what these musicians did to oblige their captors.

It had three main duties. One was to play marches as slave labourers left the camp in the morning and as they returned at night, staggering with exhaustion and sometimes carrying the corpses of comrades who had dropped dead that day. The second was to play music as the transports of inmates, mostly Jews and mostly destined for immediate extermination, arrived in cattle trucks at the disembarkation ramp. During the selection process for slave labour or death the orchestra played, a cynical ploy by the SS to make the condemned think that in arriving at a place where music was played things could not be too bad. This, especially, horried the players.

The third was to give private concerts and recitals for their music-loving guards, who despite working amidst the utmost wickedness and depravity liked to pose as civilised consumers of culture (or perhaps, for some of them, it was a distraction from the horror happening around them). Dr Mengele, when not experimenting on pregnant women, was partial to an operatic duet, and Rudolf Höss, the commandant, liked an aria from Madama Buttery before going o to select more victims. On Sunday nights the orchestra would give concerts of up to three hours for the SS. It disgusted the musicians: but their utility was all that kept them from death.

The orchestra was far from entirely Jewish. Several Poles played in it and, later, Russian women prisoners of war. Indeed its conductor for much of its existence, Alma Rosé, an Austrian violinist who had toured Europe and had an international reputation, was under constant pressure to keep the quota of Jews in the ensemble down. Rosé is one of the foremost heroines of this book. She was the niece of Gustav Mahler, and her renown meant she was welcomed by her captors on arriving at the camp, and put in charge of the orchestra. She used her superior musicianship not merely to raise the standards of playing and performance, but to school members of the orchestra to a point where their positions were safeguarded and the risk of their being removed from the orchestra and sent to their deaths had been eradicated.

Actress Jane Alexander conducts in the 1980 movie, Playing for Time Credit: Getty

To achieve this she often resorted to harsh words, and sometimes to beating those who she thought were not trying: not because she was, like their guards, a brute, but because she was desperate to save their lives. Eventually the strain became intolerable for her. She died in April 1944, not directly murdered, but of some form of poisoning, possibly botulism. Sebba also says that some thought she might have been suicidal, or that a jealous inmate had poisoned her (Rosé and all the musicians had privileges about their dress, food and accommodation, but Rosé had more than most, and some felt she ingratiated herself with the guards).

In the months after her death it proved hard to hold the orchestra together, there being no-one else who had her discipline and range of musical talents. Yet as the Russians advanced and the German defeat became inevitable, it ceased to matter. In October 1944 the Jews in the orchestra were sent to Belsen; the non-Jews left shortly before the Russians reached the camp in January 1945, going to Ravensbruck and other prisons in Germany. Despite the hideous conditions and the rampant disease in Belsen, and the winter “death marches” back to Germany, many of the orchestra survived. Sebba tells the story of their post-war lives; some earned a living through music, others never touched an instrument again, and some could not even bear, for years, to hear music at all.

The orchestra rehearses in Playing for Time, a movie based on the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz Credit: Getty

Among the vast testimonies published about Auschwitz there have been a number of books, and documentaries, about the orchestra. Not only does Sebba appear to have read most of them – published or unpublished – and have seen or heard the recorded material, but she managed to interview the last two survivors: Hilde Grünbaum, who died in 2024 shortly after her 100th birthday, and Anita Wallsch, the distinguished cellist who co-founded the English Chamber Orchestra, and will celebrate her 100th birthday in July.

Sebba’s command of detail is superb. She quite rightly outlines the atrocities of the sadists, psychopaths and savages whom Auschwitz seemed to attract like a magnet; but also the resilience and courage of a group of women who refused to be beaten by evil, and used music to save their lives.

The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz is published by W&N at £22. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books