Description

‘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.

Publisher Review

Anne Sebba tells this harrowing story with tremendous rigour and care, capturing both the complex horror of the women’s situation and the dignity and bravery with which they faced it. An impressive, important, deeply moving book — SARAH WATERS An important book, powerfully written, carefully researched. The frightening and discordant notes of Auschwitz can be he heard through an ensemble of compelling voices, voices we must never forget — THOMAS HARDING Anne Sebba brings meticulous research and a brilliant writer’s eye to one of the darkest questions of World War II. What would you do to survive and what might be the price? — ANTHONY HOROWITZ An important record of the incomprehensible cruelty perpetrated in Auschwitz, using music as an instrument of torture. But for those who played, it was a path to survival — VICTORIA HISLOP If you read just one book about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, make it this. The author tells a story of how darkness beyond the imagination could never extinguish the light of humanity at its brightest, bravest and best — ANTHONY SELDON An important addition to our understanding of Auschwitz, of women’s experiences during the Shoah, of the power of music to resist the overwhelming forces of dehumanisation and most especially of the apparent paradox that the killers could cherish beautiful music at one moment and then resume their monstrous killing the next. The research is prodigious, the stories gripping. The book deepens all that we know and shows that examining one subset of the victims of Auschwitz, only enhances our understanding of life within the camp — MICHAEL BERENBAUM, Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies Anne Sebba’s groundbreaking study reminds us of the sheer insanity, perversity and uniqueness of the Holocaust – where some of Europe’s most accomplished citizens, its Jewish musicians, were made to play music as they witnessed their relatives and fellow Jews being gassed — TOM GROSS Anne Sebba has done it again. In this superb and timely book about an extraordinary, and often overlooked slice, of WWII history, Sebba succeeds in presenting complex, conflicting and challenging questions – survival, choice, collaboration, friendship, in the worst of circumstances – with great intelligence and, most of all, with compassion. She dares the reader to stand in the shoes of those who lived through these brutal and appalling times. Rigorously researched and elegantly written, this is the biography of the women’s orchestra of Auschwitz we need. Magnificent — KATE MOSSE