Bergen-Belsen

Anne Frank died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in late February 1945. Her last days were spent in the sick barracks caring for her sister Margot, who had a high fever and smiled contentedly, her mind already wandering. Anne, too, had been feverish, but ‘friendly and sweet’, according to witnesses. Her last recorded words were: ‘Margot will sleep well, and when she sleeps I won’t need to get up again.’  Ruth Franklin’s superb and subtle book pivots around this moment, which is described in a starkly titled central chapter, ‘Corpse’. Half her study tells Anne’s story up to the tragedy of her death. It traces her parents’ backgrounds and characters, her

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. The ash from human