Playing the cello saved Anita Lasker’s life. Deported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz in December 1943, aged 18, she, like all its prisoners, found her head being shaved, her clothes stripped off and a number tattooed onto her arm. A young woman who was taking away her shoes bombarded her with questions.
Lasker remarked that she played the cello. The response? “That is fantastic. You will be saved.” Soon, to her own amazement, Lasker was a member of something completely unexpected in such a context: an orchestra.
This spring marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the legacies of the Holocaust are much in the spotlight. Lasker (married name Lasker-Wallfisch), who is 99, was recently featured in a BBC TV documentary The Last Musician of Auschwitz. Now the biographer Anne Sebba has turned her attention to the entire women’s orchestra, in an extraordinary account of survival against all the odds.
The orchestra was the brainchild of an ambitious camp overseer, Maria Mandl, who intended it to increase her authority and influence in the hierarchy. The incarcerated musicians were required to play marches while their fellow prisoners were herded out to hard labour in the mornings and when they returned at night.
They were also sometimes summoned to perform at functions held by Nazi dignitaries, and occasionally for individuals. Lasker once had to play Schumann’s poetic “Träumerai” (“Dreaming”) for Joseph Mengele, notorious for his sadistic medical experiments on inmates. Nevertheless, being in the orchestra helped many of these young women stay alive.
What made Sebba take up this harrowing story? Now 73, she is renowned for her biographies of strong women of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Wallis Simpson and Jennie Churchill, the American mother of Winston. Her motivation for this book, however, was personal.
Sebba’s father, Major Eric Rubinstein, had been in the British Army and was involved in dismantling the liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in spring 1945. “I had known that he had been at Belsen,” Sebba says, “but he never talked about it.” She discovered his role only by visiting the National Archives. “I found his army record. At Belsen, he was in charge of setting fire to the louse-ridden huts.”
Bergen-Belsen was where many of the women’s orchestra members had ended up. Sebba reckons her father’s path had crossed that of their survivors. “They gave a Red Cross concert on 24 May. That was a day that my father put in his war diary.”
He was responsible for procurement, chiefly of food and clothes; it would also have been his job to seek a cello for Lasker. “Clearly he wasn’t able to get one: Anita wasn’t in that concert because she had no instrument,” Sebba recounts. “But discovering that my father was there at that moment then led me into the backstory of Auschwitz.”
The orchestra women were from many countries, deported from, for example, Germany, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Greece, France and other parts of Poland. Around half of them were Jewish.
Most were not professional musicians; this “orchestra” was really a rag-tag band of whatever people and instruments could be found. Lasker was unusual as an expert, and even she had not played for about two years.
“The few professionals were the women who made the orchestral arrangements for them to play,” Sebba says. “The others were mostly kids, 14 or 15 years old, who’d maybe had two years of learning to toot a recorder. Many of them had seen their parents killed.
If you go to Auschwitz and see the conditions that human beings were put through – the cold, the lack of food, the brutality, the mud, the appalling excess of inhumanity – you wonder why they would want to go on. Yet one thing I have learned is that the desire to live is extremely strong.”
Whatever sustained them, it was probably not the music. “Most of the time they were scarcely playing real music,” Sebba says. The members had better conditions than their fellow inmates experienced; that would have aided their survival. But so, too, did the fact that the orchestra could help them concentrate on something beyond the daily agonies of cold, hunger, disease and the ever-present danger of death.
“It’s not that they could lose themselves in beautiful music. It was that they had to lose themselves in focusing on playing well.”
The orchestra’s lynchpin was its conductor, Alma Rosé. A professional violinist and director who had toured with her own all-female orchestra before the war, she was put in charge almost as soon as she arrived as a new prisoner.
She happened to be the niece of the composer Gustav Mahler. She saved many lives by recruiting girls to play in the ensemble and fought for further privileges for them whenever opportunity arose. Such was her clout that at one point she was even granted the use of a grand piano.
The first-ever account of this orchestra was fraught with controversy, especially where Rosé was concerned. A memoir in 1976 by the French pianist, composer and singer Fania Fénélon, one of the orchestra members, caused fury among fellow survivors by depicting Rosé as a cruel, dictatorial conductor.
A television film based on Fénélon’s book, Playing for Time, had a script by the great Arthur Miller, but was criticised for starring the tall, blonde Vanessa Redgrave as the short, dark Fénélon.
It took a memoir by Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth (1996), to set the record straight. In it, she recounted the horrors of her experiences at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
The fact was that Rosé had had to be strict: if they did not play well, they would have been sent to the gas chambers. Rosé herself died in Auschwitz in April 1944, from seemingly accidental poisoning.
Perhaps most valuable of all was the close bond that built up between the orchestra women; they helped and supported one another in circumstances that put them in mortal danger.
Sometimes their friendships survived beyond the war; sometimes they did not. Sebba mentions two former orchestra members who met by chance in a department store years later, but felt unable to rekindle their connection.
Lasker-Wallfisch is one of only two survivors whom Sebba was able to interview. At first, she thought her the only one. She discovered another, Hilde Grünbaum (married name Simcha), by chance through contacts in Israel and was able to talk to her before the violinist and orchestrator died in 2023.
How will these vital histories be preserved once the last Holocaust survivors are no longer with us – especially since, as Sebba puts it, “everybody says that unless you were there, you can’t understand it”?
It is a daunting thought in a world where it’s considered that an author must somehow own a story to have the right to tell it; but it is nevertheless essential that new generations of researchers and writers should approach this territory, or the memories will eventually be lost.
“What I feel with this book is that I’m happy to have done something that needed to be done,” Sebba says. “If people think of Auschwitz, they think of thousands of people being disgorged from trains, then being shaved; and just as the Nazis wanted, they’re reduced to a number and their humanity taken from them, and we don’t know who they are.
“And here are between 40 and 50 women; I’ve given them their names and tried to construct a story around each of them.
“I wanted to convey who these women were and what they did. For me, every one is a heroine. Above all, they survived. That’s resistance.” This book, both testimony and tribute, may stand as a memorial to them.
The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, by Anne Sebba, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on 27 March