by Anne Sebba
First published 2025
In 1943, SS officers at Auschwitz-Birkenau commanded nearly fifty female prisoners from eleven countries to form an orchestra. These women and girls, most with minimal musical training, faced an impossible situation. They played marching songs for exhausted workers departing for labor each morning and returning broken each evening. They performed weekly concerts for Nazi officers and provided solo entertainment on demand. Their musical participation saved them from death but trapped them in moral complexity. The orchestra included conductor Alma Rosé, Gustav Mahler's niece and celebrated violinist, and teenage cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who became the group's final survivor. Anne Sebba, author of Les Parisiennes and That Woman, examines how these women navigated survival while serving their captors' propaganda needs. Using archival materials and firsthand testimonies, she explores the cost of living through music in a death camp and the burden of owing survival to complicity with genocide.
Genres: holocaust, historical-fiction, 20th-century, world-war-ii, biography-memoir, music
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, moral-complexity
Setting: Auschwitz-Birkenau
Period: 1943
400 pages · Hardcover · St. Martin's Press
Content warnings: death