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The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival
- Author: Sebba, Anne
Anne Sebba’s painstakingly researched, and sensitively written account highlights the moral dilemmas, personality clashes and the political and racial jockeying faced by the individual members...
The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival
- Author: Sebba, Anne
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Anne Sebba’s painstakingly researched, and sensitively written account highlights the moral dilemmas, personality clashes and the political and racial jockeying faced by the individual members...
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'Superb and timely' KATE MOSSE
'Impressive, important, deeply moving' SARAH WATERS
'Brilliant' ANTHONY HOROWITZ
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 1943, German SS officers in charge of Auschwitz-Birkenau ordered that an orchestra should be formed among the female prisoners. Almost fifty women and girls from eleven nations were assembled to play marching music to other inmates - forced labourers who left each morning and returned, exhausted and often broken, at the end of the day - and give weekly concerts for Nazi officers. Individual members were sometimes summoned to give solo performances of an officer's favourite piece of music. It was the only entirely female orchestra in any of the Nazi prison camps and, for almost all of the musicians chosen to take part, being in the orchestra was to save their lives. In The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, award-winning historian Anne Sebba tells their astonishing story with sensitivity and care.
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- The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival
Awards and reviews
Anne Sebba’s painstakingly researched, and sensitively written account highlights the moral dilemmas, personality clashes and the political and racial jockeying faced by the individual members who joined the orchestra. It’s a profoundly moving story that also manages to retain a degree of objectivity in describing the horrific circumstances under which these musicians were expected to work.
Impressive . . . Sebba's command of detail is superb. She quite rightly outlines the atrocities of the sadists, psychopaths and savages whom Auschwitz seemed to attract like a magnet; but also the resilience and courage of a group of women who refused to be beaten by evil, and used music to save their lives -- Simon Heffer
