The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz

Moving and powerful,this is a vivid portrait of the women who came together to form an orchestra in order to survive the horrors of Auschwitz. New York Times bestselling author of Les Parisiennes and That Woman: A Life of Wallis Simpson now examines how a disparate band of young girls struggled to overcome differences and little musical knowledge to please the often-sadistic Nazi overseers. In 1943German SS officers in charge of Auschwitz-Birkenau ordered that an orchestra be formed among the female prisoners. Almost fifty women and girls from eleven nations were drafted into a band that would play in all weathers marching music to other inmatesforced laborers who left each morning and returnedexhausted and often brokenat the end of the day. While still living amid the harshest of circumstanceswith little more than a bowl of soup to eatthey were also made to give weekly concerts for Nazi officersand individual members were sometimes summoned to give solo performances. For almost all of the musicians chosen to take partbeing 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 Auschwitzaward-winning historian Anne Sebba traces these tangled questions of deep moral complexity with sensitivity and care. From Alma Ros├⌐the orchestra’s main conductorniece of Gustav Mahler and a formidable pre-war celebrity violinistto Anita Lasker-Wallfischits teenage cellist and last surviving memberSebba draws on meticulous archival research and exclusive first-hand accounts to tell the full and astonishing story of the orchestraits membersand the response of other prisoners for the first time.