ANNE SEBBA The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz. Reviewed by Justine Ettler

British historian Anne Sebba’s account of the Nazi death camp describes the dissonance of beautiful music in a place of suffering and death.

A monstrous, life-and-death version of sing for your supper, The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz fascinates as it horrifies with terrors both familiar and unthinkable. It charts the evolution of the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz II-Birkenau from conception to first performance in April 1943, to eventual dismantlement in October 1944. Comprising 40 mostly teenage members, it was the only women’s orchestra in the camps, but in the hands of the Nazis, music no longer had anything to do with pleasure as we conventionally understand it. Sebba’s thorough, even-handed approach is a timely reminder that ‘art’ can serve evil regimes as readily as the just.

Initially used as a forced labour camp, Auschwitz was expanded in 1942 when the mass transportation of Jews began and the Birkenau women’s camp was established. Jewish deportees, especially the elderly and the very young, were ‘selected’ on arrival to be gassed, while the fit, the young or political prisoners were used for forced labour and worked and starved to death. A remainder were selected for Dr Josef Mengele’s grotesque medical experiments.

Not part of the original Nazi plan, the women’s orchestra evolved over time. Orchestra members not only escaped being gassed but, thanks to the bravery of a few members who fought hard against the regime, were granted certain privileges, including extra food, access to toilets and basic sanitation, and clothing.

Just as in the men’s camp, the women performed jaunty marches from a Nazi-approved repertoire on a daily basis to ensure the arriving and departing female prisoners assigned to hard labour kept in step. They had about 12 marches in their repertoire and if they finished the list they simply started again from the beginning.

The Nazis employed music to lull the new arrivals into a false sense of security. Arrivals would hear the music and doubt the terrible stories they’d heard. One inmate remembered hearing Dvorak and Smetana.

But the orchestra also performed while prisoners were being marched to the gas chambers, and continued to play as smoke billowed from the chimneys of the crematoriums. In the hands of the Nazis, music became an accompaniment to mass murder.

In addition, the orchestra gave weekly performances for the prisoners, played for the sick in the infirmary, and entertained the guards. They even played for the occasional visiting Nazi dignitary.

While the orchestra contained a mixture of nationalities, the Nazis mandated a balance between Jewish and non-Jewish members (so that not too many Jewish lives were saved). In order to accommodate as many amateur musicians as possible (and thereby save their lives) mandolins, recorders and accordions were all incorporated into the orchestra, even singers were added. Remarkably, almost all survived, with the exception of their primary conductor and champion, the virtuoso violinist Alma Rose, Gustav Mahler’s niece.

A Jewish-Austrian whose parents converted to Protestantism, it was Alma’s professionalism and determination as a conductor that held the orchestra together. Some members complained that she was too strict a disciplinarian but others argue that Alma needed to be strict because if the orchestra failed they would ‘go to the gas’.

Thus a moral conundrum lies at the heart of Alma’s achievement. Yes she saved 40 girls, but to do so she not only had to liaise with Nazis, she also had to employ all her musical ability to tough-love the girls, many of whom could barely play scales, into musicians capable of pleasing their captors. In some ways she resembled the Nazis and their kapo commanders.

Helene, a Belgian member, recalled performing when a group of Belgians walked past:

‘One woman recognised me and cried out: “Is it you Helene?” I collapsed in tears. Alma was furious. When we returned to the music block, I was still crying. She slapped my face to calm me down and told me never ever to lose control of my nerves. The show must go on. I never lost control again. I never held a grudge against Alma for I understood the lesson.’

The story of the women’s orchestra is not new, but what sets Sebba’s book apart from the existing memoirs and histories – like feisty French chanteuse and orchestra member Fania Fénelon’s The Musicians of Auschwitz, or Richard Newman’s collection of interviews from 2000 – is her ability to deliver a comprehensive and impartial overview. It takes a deft hand to convey the numerous and inevitable tribal tensions that occasionally erupted between members without taking sides. Divisions existed along religious – i.e. Jewish and non Jewish – as well as national lines, between Poles, Slovaks, French, Belgians and Czechs.

Another cause of division was between members like cellist Anita Lasker, who said the music lifted her above her misery into the sublime, reminding her that things like beauty, culture and the outside world still existed, and others who found performing in full view of the gas chambers and the crematoriums unbearable.

Charlotte Delbo, a member of the French resistance and a political prisoner, loathed hearing Viennese waltzes while naked prisoners reduced to skeletons dragged themselves to work driven by violent blows. Overall though, as Sebba is quick to point out, the women in the orchestra worked together as a team; their lives depended on it.

Sebba’s history makes compelling reading, recording what must be one of the cruellest uses of an artform of all time. A valuable insight into the growing appeal of Zionism at this time – many of the young Jewish girls were desperate to leave Europe and relocate in then-British Palestine – the book also offers a fresh take for readers already familiar with Auschwitz and its countless horrors. Most of all this well written overview is timely, because Anita Laskar, the last living orchestra member, is 99, which means the story is about to pass from living memory. With war again in Europe, this reminder of the very worst humans are capable of is confronting but essential reading.

Anne Sebba The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A story of survival Weidenfeld and Nicholson PB 400pp $34.99

Justine Ettler is the author of three novels and has a PhD in English from the University of Sydney.

You can buy The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

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Tags: Alma Rose, Anne | Sebba, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, British historians, concentration camps, history, music, the Holocaust, women musicians, World War II