Women’s Orchestra in Auschwitz by Anne Sebba: How music saved 40 women from gas rooms

Women’s Orchestra in Auschwitz by Anne Sebba (Weidelfeld and Nicolson £ 22, 400pp)

Maria Mandl, known as “The Beast”, was her sadistic guard from Auschwitz-Birkenau who founded the women’s orchestra.

Notorious about her brutality, Mandl smiled as she selected the prisoners for the gas rooms and was known to kick her death.

She imposed calls from dawn to dusk in sub-zero conditions, leaving frozen women to the point of immobility before pulling them aside.

She took the children from the transports received, kept her, sang to them and then escorted them to their death.

The more vicious, the more it rises.

It feels impossible to reconcile the exceptional brutality for which Mandl was known with her love confessed for music, but was part of a system in which cruelty and culture coexisted, where the killers could appreciate Mozart and still commit atrocities without a flicker of consciousness.

Anne Sebba unleashes in terms of the atrocities of the camp, describing shocking cases of cannibalism in which the hungry prisoners ate the stolen organs of their dead camp colleagues in their desperate survival offer.

At Mandl’s hour, the young violin student Eva Benedek, initially safe in the orchestra protection ranks, was incapable of escaping death once her worsening task was discovered.

He is allowed to deliver his child, then he was devoid of food and so incapable of breastfeeding. The child died of hunger in her presence, after which she was gas.

In this book that deeply affects, Sebba rebuilds the experiences of women, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who played in the orchestra in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

There is a terrible paradox in the center of existence of the orchestra, an unbearable intrusion of beauty in the worst place imaginable. While for some prisoners, it may have offered a momentary comfort and an illusion of freedom, for others it was a cruel memory of the life they had lost.

The orchestra sang daily, playing marches while the hungry prisoners were forced to work in nearby factories; destroying the whims of SS officers after their mass murder; and the creation of a grotesque illusion of normality for the new ones in the camp.

The instruments were stolen from the Jewish prisoners who arrived carrying their most appreciated possessions, without knowing that they were to be stripped of everything, including their lives.

The survival in Auschwitz was arbitrary, dependent on the whims of the guards, the holding of a skill considered useful or lucky.

Initially, the Jews were excluded from the orchestra, but the demand for women musicians led to their inclusion and soon became a microcosm of the larger world, marked by tensions between Jewish and non-Jewish musicians.

Their varied talents and the entry into the orchestra were, in the pianist words and the accordionist Flora Jacob, a “door to life”. The Jews have been encouraged for a long time to acquire portable riches: knowledge and skills that cannot be taken, because they were so often faced with the movement, persecution and confiscation of the property.

Sebba’s book is full of remarkable people, such as Alma Rose, Austrian-Evu’s violinist and Gustav Mahler’s granddaughter. After the first conductor of the orchestra, Zofia Czajkowska, non-Jew, was eliminated by Rose’s upper talent, Rose became both a protective and a pregnancy master.

She was disciplined ruthlessly, pushing women to maintain a standard of excellence, because she knew that their survival depends on her.

Rose strategically decided to replace non-Jewish musicians with the Jews whenever possible, knowing that non-Jew players, many of them political prisoners, were not in danger of gas chambers. It was a decision that saved 40 lives; However, her position was full of moral dilemmas.

Many of the women wondered if their survival had reached too high a price. However, as Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the orchestra cellist, now 99 years old and the last surviving member, said it: they had no choice.

And yet, there is something deeply disturbing in knowing the fact that SS officers, including Josef Mengele, would ask for private music, then will return to their terrible selection of who should live and die. Mengele’s choice was Schumann’s traumas (dreaming), a song from his childhood scenes.

What stands out most in this book, beyond horror, is the final resistance and solidarity among these women. In a place conceived to strip them from their humanity, they clung to each other. They shared food, protected the weakest of them and found small ways to defy their captors.

Despite the danger, Alma Rose secretly dared to play Mendelssohn forbidden compositions, whose Jewish heritage made her music unacceptable under Nazi ideology.

As the war approached its end, the Jewish members of the orchestra were transported to Bergen-Belsen. They had no idea if this movement meant a chance at survival or just another stage in their extermination. Sebba’s description of the camp’s release moves deeply.

However, release was not the end of suffering. Women wore Auschwitz’s scars for the rest of their lives. Some have never reached a musical instrument, unable to separate their horror art that had been forced to serve. Others constantly asked if they did enough to resist.

Which makes Auschwitz female orchestra so strong is his uninterrupted commitment for details. Sebba ensures that the name of each woman, each story, is documented.

This is not a face -free tragedy, but it is a collection of individual lives, each worth memory. In the Jewish tradition, when someone dies, we say, their memory is for a blessing. This book is a deeply felt joint of this feeling.

There is a fierceness following the one of the 80th anniversaries of the liberation of Auschwitz, while the last survivors leave us, passing the responsibility to confess the next generations. This book reminds us that extremism does not appear in a vacuum and that dehumanization can happen in steps.