When 13-year-old Pearl Pufeles disembarked from the cattle car at Auschwitz in March 1944, she was surprised to hear the strains of Dvořák and Smetana wafting towards her. “Gosh,” thought the Czechoslovakian schoolgirl, “this can’t be that bad if they play music here.” But it was that bad and, indeed, so much worse. Pearl and her twin sister Helen were swiftly selected as laboratory fodder for Dr Josef Mengele’s grotesque medical experiments.
It isn’t clear which orchestra Pearl had heard that day. Auschwitz was a 15 sq mile complex with multiple sub-camps and there were at least six “official” orchestras staffed by prisoners who had been funnelled into southern Poland from all over Europe. Some of these orchestras concentrated on the classical repertoire, albeit without the Jewish composers Mendelssohn and Mahler. Others specialised in Sunday afternoon concerts of operetta and dance music. By far the likeliest music to be heard around the camps, though, was jaunty military marches, played loudly every morning as the prisoners set off for work, and then again in the evening as they limped back to camp, dragging their dying colleagues behind them.
In this deft book, Anne Sebba tells the story of the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, which operated in various iterations between April 1943 and October 1944. For nine crucial months, it was led by Alma Rosé, a virtuoso violinist and niece of Gustav Mahler. Rosé set to her task with obsessional energy, recruiting the best players from among the vast prison population, regardless of nationality, ethnicity or mother tongue. While a handful of her “girls” were professional musicians, most of the 40 or so players were simply young women who had taken music lessons to please their parents and were now desperately mugging up half-remembered scales. Rosé didn’t bother to conceal her contempt for having to work with amateurs, screaming at anyone who played a wrong note: “Du blöde Kuh” (“You stupid cow”). Missing an entrance got you a rap over the knuckles.
And here, as Sebba delicately but firmly indicates, is one of the moral faultlines that runs through this story of music-making at the gates of hell. In some ways, Rosé behaved as if she were a kapo – a prisoner who worked with the Nazis rather than against them. As leader of the women’s orchestra, she got better clothes, more food and a personal maid. She even made friends with Maria Mandl, a beast of a female guard who was hanged after the war for crimes against humanity.
But – and it is a huge but – Alma Rosé created this bubble of comparative privilege around herself and her orchestra because she knew that it was her best chance of keeping her girls “from going to the gas”. Members of the orchestra were relieved of hard labour and, should they fall sick from the ubiquitous typhus, they were less likely to be selected for extermination. Sebba reckons that Rosé’s brand of tough musical love saved up to 40 inmates from certain death. So, it is ironic that she herself died in strange circumstances, most likely by food poisoning, 10 months before the camp was liberated in January 1945.
Rosé’s story has been told before, most particularly in a biography by Richard Newman from 2000 that contained interviews with members of the women’s orchestra who were still alive at the time. In addition, several of the “girls” wrote their own memoirs which have provided the basis for various documentaries.Sebba’s achievement here is to synthesise a large amount of existing material to produce a vivid account of the experiences of the 40 or so women who briefly came together to make the music that saved their lives. We meet everyone from Fania Fénelon, the feisty Parisian chanteuse, to Flora Jacobs, the piano accordionist from the Netherlands who briefly got picked to be a nanny to the commandant’s children. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the London-based cellist who is still alive today at 99, tells the canonical story of how one day Mengele appeared in front of her and told her to play Schumann’s exquisite Träumerei.
We hear of the inevitable jealousies, squabbles and antisemitism (the orchestra was made up of Jews and Catholics). And running through this fine book is Sebba’s empathy for the impossible moral choices presented to these young women, who were given a chance of survival in exchange for making music.
• The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival by Anne Sebba is published by Orion on 27 March (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
