HORRIFIC eras of history inevitably provoke self-examination: what would I have done faced with an unconscionable situation? And this is the question hovering over Anne Sebba’s latest book, The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A story of survival.
The orchestra, the only all-female ensemble established by the Nazis in any of its camps, prisons, and ghettos during the Second World War, came into being in April 1943, and existed until October 1944. The musicians played marches at the camp gate so that exhausted prisoners would move more quickly to and from their work. They also played Sunday concerts, and ad hoc recitals for visiting Nazi dignitaries.
About 40 core players passed through the orchestra, and all these women were saved from being gassed or deliberately killed, though two died before liberation. Although their story has been told before, Mrs Sebba positions the orchestra within both the story of Auschwitz — where 1.1 million men, women, and children, mostly Jews, perished — and the story of Holocaust survivors.
“In terms of how I wrote the book, I did not want to deliberately tug at the heartstrings as to how ghastly it was to play music in the cold, to play when you are hungry, to play when you have been beaten, when you’ve got no food and no clothes, and walking in the mud and the stench, and the diarrhoea that everybody talks about. I do mention it, but I thought the story was harrowing enough. I’ve tried to write it in as flat a tone as possible to pay homage to these women, because from my perspective everyone is a heroine; merely by surviving, they’re resisting the Nazis. Surviving is resistance in itself.”
The author of ten books, including a biography of Mother Teresa, That Woman: The life of Wallis Simpson, and Les Parisiennes, which examined women’s lives in wartime Paris, Mrs Sebba took a historian’s perspective to keep a tight, narrative rein on the orchestra’s members, giving a 360° view of events. “At one point, there were almost 50 characters in the orchestra, to say nothing of Auschwitz itself and the guards; so, if you are trying to make a rounded portrait, it is the most difficult thing to feel you’re being fair. But some characters are just wilder than the others, or there’s more information about them. But, unquestionably, because Hilde [Grunbaum] and Anita [Lasker] were still alive, I wanted to resist giving them more coverage, but it’s almost impossible, especially because they were, in their way, leaders.”
Anita, a German Jew from Breslau, came to Auschwitz as an 18-year-old, and played the cello in the orchestra. Hilde, who celebrated her 100th birthday in Israel, was also Jewish, and from Berlin. She came to Auschwitz in her early twenties, and was a violinist in the women’s orchestra, besides providing orchestration.
MRS SEBBA is fascinated by the interplay of hope, character, and survival. “The big question is: did they survive because that’s who they were — the strong character — or was the survival and the trauma what made them? It’s the chicken and egg. I can’t categorically say what I believe, but I think it was their character in the end, because, having spent time with Anita, she is really quite extraordinary — strong-minded — and was without her parents from being a teenager, and was in prison with her sister.
“When you think of all she went through, lots of things occurred to me. Why did she, why did any of them, want to survive when she had seen all the brutality and bestiality, and their family had been killed? What makes you want to survive? That was one of the overarching themes I tried to pull through.”
She maintains that a desire to continue, a commitment to staying alive, can coexist with religious faith, or be a character trait independent of spiritual conviction. “In any situation I think hope — you could call it positivity — for anyone to wake up and think today is going to be a great day, or tomorrow is going to be a great day. . . It’s a trivial comparison, and I don’t want to put too much emphasis on it, but I do believe in hope.”
Hope was an inextinguishable force for the book’s subjects. “And, in the camps, even Hilde, who grew up in a relatively secular Jewish home, put hope as her religion: Hope and Zionism. Anita is not religious at all — what made her survive? Of all of them, one or two wanted to live for revenge. One or two of them wanted to live, desperately hoping they would see their parents, their family, again. One or two of them just wanted to survive, because survival is the most extraordinary thing, and that’s why the subtitle of my book is A story of survival.
“But I wanted to show this extraordinary backbone of steel, that, against all the odds, makes people in this scenario. It’s not just the camps: people who are taken prisoner at any stage, or people who have a ghastly life, or people who have children who suffer from some ghastly life-threatening illness — it’s hope that drives them and keeps you going.
“I am fascinated by whether you can acquire hope, whether you are born with it, or whether you can learn it. You can say it’s just that some people are positive and some are negative, and maybe I’m lucky I’m positive; so I do identify with it. To me, it’s not religion. There were one or two people in the orchestra for whom you would say it was religious faith, and I don’t think it’s mostly Catholics. There were all faiths and none. There were Christians, Catholics, Orthodox Jews, agnostics, atheists, everything.”
FAITH and ritual can enhance an ability to live, against horrendous odds. “Because [Hilde] was a copyist, she had access to paper; and paper was in short supply in the camp, and she used the paper to make symbolic Friday-night candles, and to light the candles. And she would read not from a Bible — she didn’t have that — but from any book. And often it was Faust, which, in her view, was the most wonderful piece of German literature. So, she had faith in literature. Somehow, it was this solidarity, it was this gathering people together, it was a sense of fairness, a sense of doing the right thing.”
Another incident of interfaith light was Helene Rounder, who was Jewish and a singer from Paris, making a card at Easter for Helena Dunicz, a Catholic, when she was in the Revier (infirmary). Helene made her a card with a crucifix, and Helena wrote about it in her memoir, how moving it was that a Jewish girl would make her an Easter card. “It’s not the grand gestures, it’s just a crumb here and there. Watching out for somebody who has given up, and chivvying them to keep going,” Mrs Sebba says.
It was only decades after three of the players had left the horror behind that they were able to reflect on how religion could also be a divisive, corroding force. “There was bad feeling, or you can call it anti-Semitism. The Poles were allowed food parcels, because they weren’t Jewish. And the Jews weren’t allowed food parcels, or there was nobody left to send them; so arguments over food were rampant.”
Recalling a research visit to Israel, Mrs Sebba continues: “Anita, aged 99, was clearing out her files, and said: ‘I’ve found a file of letters. I’m going to throw it away. Nobody’s interested. Unless you want it?’ And I said ‘Yes, please.’ They are letters between Anita, Zosha, and Helena. Anita is born Jewish, but not very active; Zofia [Cykowiak, a violinist from Posnan] and Helena [Dunicz, a violinist from Lwów], especially Helena, is an active Catholic, and faith matters to her.
“In their sixties and seventies, in the early 1990s, when they write to each other, they say how foolish to have had these arguments over anti-Semitism, when, actually, they had so much more in common than separated them,” Mrs Sebba says.
“They came from middle-class families who valued music and arts, and the families played quartets at home. If they had only been able to overcome all those differences in the camp, what difference would it have made? There might have been more harmony.” Yet Auschwitz’s orchestra block was the only block that mixed Jews and Christians. “So, in one sense, it’s extraordinary the orchestra survived as long as it did.”
Mrs Sebba is not a child of Holocaust survivors, but says that her permission to write the Auschwitz women’s orchestra story came from discovering her father’s Regimental War Diary in 2022, in the National Archives. Major Eric Rubinstein, 31st Armoured Brigade, was one of the liberators of Belsen, the camp where the women’s orchestra players had been transferred in November 1944, as Russian troops advanced from the east. Major Rubinstein had ordered the destruction of old shelters at Belsen, using flame-throwers on Crocodile tanks. He was also in Belsen for a Red Cross concert, and may well have heard the women’s orchestra play.
With three grandparents who can trace their Jewish roots back for generations, Mrs Sebba describes her Judaism as embracing “culture, places, history, and music”. She fasts on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, maintaining a tradition practised by her father just after D-Day, and going back through family history. “I don’t want to break the chain.” Having attended the Christian Science-founded Claremont School in Surrey, Mrs Sebba says that she still sings hymns with enthusiasm. And now, with grandchildren of different faiths, her family celebrates a blended Passover. “I have a lifetime of remembering, and we’re still behaving badly. Why can’t we just see we are all human beings?”
The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A story of survival by Anne Sebba is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (27 March) at £22 (Church Times Bookshop £19.80); 978-1-3996-1073-5.
