Despised, perverse Auschwitz marching band gave some hope of life

A group of women prisoners in Auschwitz Concentration Camp were formed into a notorious marching band.

They played as inmates got off the trains, they played as prisoners marched for roll call and they played as ash from the crematoriums rained down on them.

The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz was hated by their fellow prisoners, British historian and author Anne Sebba told RNZ’s Afternoons.

“You can imagine if you were one of those women who had to go out to work, and you heard other women playing this jaunty marching tune as you had to form up in rows of five, you would hate that marching band, wouldn't you?

“So, the Nazis from the start were setting up one group of women against the other."

For the women in the orchestra however it offered a slim chance they might live, she says. Sebba tells their story in her new book: The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A story of survival.

The orchestra was formed by a female guard, Maria Mandl whom the orchestra members called ‘the beast’, she says. As well as a cruel prestige project for Mandl, the marching band fed the Nazi “mania for counting".

“As the other women went out to work, if they could form up in rows of five, it was easier to count them - 5, 10, 15, 20 - it saved her work.

“And that was the double motive. It wasn't because she was such a cultured person herself, although she hoped to look more cultured.”

A woman called Alma Rosé was the orchestra’s most famous conductor, the daughter of a distinguished Austrian conductor and niece of composer Gustav Mahler, she says.

“Alma Rosé did not believe until she was arrested by the Nazis that she was really Jewish, because Gustav Mahler had converted to Catholicism.

“Her mother was Justine, who also converted. And Alma was baptised. But according to Nazi racial laws, she was Jewish.”

When she was caught and Mandl recruited Rosé run the orchestra, she embraced her Jewish religion, Sebba says.

“She saw it as her role to save as many musicians and non-musicians. Some of them were kids of 15 who'd played the recorder for a couple of years in school.

“But that was really what fascinated me, that she was able to turn them into this orchestra of excellence.”

The Nazis realised what a prize they had in Rosé, she says.

“They then used the orchestra for Sunday concerts because they were so exhausted from gassing all week.

“And it was pretty horrendous what they had to do. But they needed concerts on a Sunday for three hours to soothe their jagged nerves.”

This perversion of the music is part of the “tangled” story she tells, Sebba says.

“You not only can't make sense of it, but I also almost feel that you shouldn't try, because it's such an irrational story that it undermines what the Holocaust was, which is this uniquely evil event.”

The women in the orchestra were granted some perks, she says.

“I don't think they had substantially better food, maybe occasionally, they were thrown the odd chicken bone or a pat of butter or something like that.

“But they really had very little other than their own block, their own bunk bed, access to a toilet. That was an amazing thing. Underpants, because other women in Auschwitz didn't have underwear.

“And finally, I think the real perk was hope.”

These women were given the merest chance to live, she says.

“You can't really explain what hope in a desert of atrocities does, but the idea that maybe you could survive till tomorrow.”

Rosé was a hard taskmaster and a perfectionist, but realised the orchestra survived together or died together, she says.

“As Alma kept telling them, otherwise we all go to the gas.”

Anne Sebba is on tour around New Zealand to talk about her new book, go here for lecture dates and locations.