The agony of making music at Auschwitz

Anita Lasker survived the Holocaust because, as a Berlin teenager, she had enjoyed her cello lessons. The Hungarian Lily Mathé’s violin performances had once impressed the man who became the Auschwitz concentration camp commandant. Alma Rosé, among Europe’s most talented musicians and the niece of Gustav Mahler, became the conductor who kept these young women and more than 40 others alive through ‘ferocious discipline’ and determination. In The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, Anne Sebba recounts these intertwined stories with great sensitivity. She also explores the ethical questions that haunted the survivors who were once forced to play melodies in the darkest moments of the 20th century.

Aged 18 when she was transported to Auschwitz, and embarrassed to be seen naked during delousing, Anita mumbled to the young woman demanding her shoes that she was a cellist. It was a moment that saved not only her own life but also that of her younger sister Renate. Arrested in 1943 as they tried to reach southern France on home-forged papers, the Jewish sisters had shared a capsule of cyanide given to them by a friend, only to discover that it contained icing sugar. ‘Our relief at still being alive was enormous,’ Anita later said. Separated in prison, the sisters arrived at Auschwitz on different transports. Immediately drafted into the orchestra, Anita found she was their entire bass section: she suddenly had value. When Renate arrived, she recognised Anita’s shoes on another woman’s feet and, against all the odds, they were reunited.

Luck was essential for anyone to survive the bitter cold, slave labour, starvation rations, typhus epidemics and regular selections for the gas chambers, as well as the general arbitrary violence at Auschwitz. Musicality gave a few women a further chance.