British historian and biographer Anne Sebba has written the life stories of famous women, infamous women, and ordinary women in extraordinary circumstances. But, she tells PW, "You can't call yourself a 20th-century historian if you don't deal with the central calamity of the century, which is the Holocaust." The musicians' stories featured in Sebba's book, The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival (St. Martin's, Sept.), were drawn from testimonies in archives in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, and her interviews with camp survivors include the last two orchestra members still alive in 2023. Their narratives radiate from a central fact: They were forced to play marches and popular songs for people bound for the gas chambers and slave laborers staggering to work, or to give concerts to entertain the guards. Amid the horror the message was clear: play or die.
You interviewed many Nazi camp survivors including the last two living members of the Auschwitz Women's Orchestra. Now only one remains, the cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who turns 100 next month. What did they want people to realize?
Anita told me, "Do not pretty up this story. This was not pretty music. Don't pretend we played lovely music. It was ghastly music. It was using music as an instrument of torture." So many said to me, "You cannot understand what it was like unless you were there. Don't even think you can know what it's like to be extremely cold, extremely hungry, terrified that at any moment, you'll catch an illness, you'll be shot, you'll be killed." That sort of stress makes you behave in extreme ways. Of course, it does.
You don't sugarcoat the situation to depict some kind of loving sisterhood here. Why?
Why should we expect them to be sweet and kind and loving all the time? They were when they needed to be, when they needed to play. There were moments of great sisterhood and tenderness. For example, when a Jewish girl made an Easter card with a crucifix for a Polish Catholic woman who always remembered that. They tuned each other's instruments. But there was squabbling between them, mostly over food. I felt it was much better to tell it as it was. That was the truth.
After the war, did the survivors ever make music again?
There were a few exceptions but most never did. If music is in your soul, and your soul has been so grievously wounded you can't do it anymore. You can't make the connection between your soul and music.
Why did you also interview survivors' children?
I'm not a psychiatrist, but I did want to address generational trauma. One daughter of a survivor recalled, "If you are a child and you feel ill, then it is said to you, as it was several times to me, 'Are you about to die? Have you got parents? Are you starving? Then what’s your problem?' If everything is recorded against the backdrop of what my parents went through, you can just forget it."
In the book, you write, "Almost everyone who wasn't in the orchestra despised them at some level, because they saw them as privileged." Why include this?
It's important to tell the story in full. Those who were not in the orchestra did not know that, in fact, all the women really had were beds and access to a toilet. But the orchestra women did have one great privilege above all—they had hope. If they could play, they could live. They endured the worst that humanity has to offer, and yet they somehow managed to force themselves to play and to live and, in extremity, to look after each other. So really, it is, for me, a story about hope and the triumph of the human spirit against all the odds.
