The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival

Author: Anne Sebba

In 1943, German SS officers in charge of Auschwitz-Birkenau ordered that an orchestra be formed among the female prisoners. Almost 50 women and girls from 11 nations were drafted into a band that would play marching music in all kinds of weather to other inmates, forced laborers who left each morning and returned, exhausted and often broken, at the end of the day. While still living amid the harshest of circumstances, with little more than a bowl of soup to eat, they were also made to give weekly concerts for Nazi officers, and individual members were sometimes summoned to give solo performances. For almost all of the musicians chosen to take part, being in the orchestra saved their lives. But at what cost?

What role could music play in a death camp? What was the effect on those women who owed their survival to their participation in a Nazi propaganda project? And how did it feel to be forced to provide solace to the perpetrators of a genocide that claimed the lives of their family and friends? In The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, award-winning historian Anne Sebba traces these tangled questions of deep moral complexity with sensitivity and care.

Hardback

400 pages