One evening in early 1944, four emaciated young women, attempting to rouse themselves from their grim prison conditions, began a secret performance of Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata in the cold and cramped barrack that also served as their dormitory, practice room, eating place and parcel depot. Although the piece was originally written for solo piano, it had been transcribed for three violins and a cello by a recently arrived French nightclub singer who had studied music at a conservatory before the war.
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The four women, three of whom were Jewish, were all inmates of Auschwitz, the Nazis’ most notorious extermination camp outside the southern Polish city of Oświęcim. They were part of the only entirely female orchestra in any of the prisons, camps and ghettos established by the Nazis before and during the Second World War. Throughout the orchestra’s brief existence, from April 1943 until October 1944, most of its members were teenagers, one as young as fourteen. Remarkably, almost all of the forty or so core players survived their time here and avoided being deliberately gassed, although their main conductor did not survive.
The women’s orchestra, separated from their fellow inmates in a special block, was required by their Nazi overseers to play jaunty marches every morning and evening so that other female prisoners kept in step as they were sent to work outside the camp. Playing on a grassy mound located to the side of the so-called “French gate” of the women’s camp, they had only twelve or so marches in their repertoire and if they reached the end and had played them all they simply started again from the beginning. The orchestra also performed regular weekly concerts from an approved repertoire for the other prisoners, for sick inmates in the infirmary and for guards as well as occasional visiting Nazi dignitaries.
Yet on this evening, the four women—a German, a Pole, a Belgian and a Frenchwoman—were playing Beethoven’s masterpiece, clandestinely since Jewish musicians were not considered worthy of playing such magnificent German works and were doing so just for their own pleasure. The informal concert had to be done with extreme caution, with a designated “lookout person” to warn of impending danger in the form of an SS man. Anita Lasker, eighteen at the time, passionate since childhood about the cello, recalled the occasion as “one where we were able to raise ourselves high above the inferno of Auschwitz into spheres where we could not be touched by the degradation of concentration camp existence.” On another occasion she described it as “a link with the outside world, with beauty, with culture, a complete escape into an imaginary and unattainable world.”
What may seem a disparity—sublime music expressing great emotional strain—is often at the heart of musical genius.
Auschwitz has become a byword for the mass murder and bestiality of the Nazi regime. It was a place where 1.1 million men, women and children, mostly Jews, were gassed to death while others died as a result of various forms of ill treatment, torture and starvation. It was not a place anyone would naturally associate with music at all, let alone Beethoven, the great German composer whose music offers a profound rallying cry to freedom. Not surprisingly, the other female prisoners who faced a daily offering of brutal labor and punishment as they worked, had every reason not to share Anita’s feelings about the elevating power of great music. Yet the most beautiful music is often a manifestation of deep pain, and what may seem a disparity—sublime music expressing great emotional strain—is often at the heart of musical genius.
Charlotte Delbo, a French Communist resister who arrived at Auschwitz in January 1943, was one of the other prisoners. She recalled in 1995 that it was “intolerable” to hear the women’s orchestra playing Viennese waltzes while “naked men reduced to skeletons” exited their barracks to go to work, “driven by blows that make them reel.”
Pearl Pufeles, deported in March 1944 to Auschwitz with the rest of her family, wept more than four decades later when she remembered what she believed was the cruel deception of the orchestra greeting the latest Jewish transport as they stepped off the train from Czechoslovakia with music by Dvořák and Smetana. “I said to my sister Helen, ‘Gosh, this can’t be that bad if they play music here.’ Our whole family was very musical. Helen and I played violin, my other sister had a beautiful voice.” But as she and Helen were twins, volunteering for the orchestra was not an option. They were selected instead for grotesque medical “experiments,” supervised by the infamous SS mass murderer Dr. Josef Mengele.
Irene Zisblatt, just thirteen when she arrived in Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, remembered being forced to listen to the orchestra that autumn:
We’d just come in…after four hours in the rain, and they brought us back close to the crematoria so that the ashes were falling on the ground where we were, and they ordered us to sit on the ground, there were hot ashes like drizzles of rain on us. And they told us they were going to give us a concert to celebrate the holidays. And so 32,000 [sic] women more or less sat on the ground on the hot ashes, all the crematoria were burning away, the stench from the bodies…it was a gray day, it was like nighttime so dark.
And there in front of us on a platform were these beautiful women in crisp uniforms with makeup and lipstick and blonde, long hair and these SS men, young men, strong and well fed…laughing…having a great time.
And then the band came up on the platform.
We sat for hours, it was torture, we just wanted to die. We will never enjoy this band or have the hair and the lipstick. It was another way of killing us.
Like Pearl, Irene was reduced to tears when she recounted this memory of the orchestra in an interview in Florida in 1995 for the Shoah Foundation. “This was not music for our souls,” she declared emphatically. “I was thinking of my parents and brothers and people burning.”
Although some former prisoners did look back on their time in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest section of the overall camp where most prisoners were held until they died or were deliberately gassed, and recalled hearing music as soothing or at least something which offered a chance for them to take their minds off the grim daily realities they faced, these conflicting testimonies illustrate why the story of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra does not belong to any one individual or even exclusively to the players themselves.
Their audience of fellow prisoners matters, as well as the responses of the various male orchestras who occasionally looked on enviously as they had to work as well as play music. Szymon Laks, conductor of one of several male orchestras at Auschwitz-Birkenau, vehemently refuted the notion that music was helpful to anyone in the camp. “In no case did I ever meet a prisoner who found courage in our music, whose life our music helped save,” he commented. Laks was clear-eyed about the role of his and other orchestras being entirely a propaganda tool for the Nazis and was fully aware of the unfairness of these “privileges” granted to the small number of prisoners eligible, just one of the many moral conundrums at the heart of this story.
In 1976 the French singer who had transcribed the Pathétique sonata for the impromptu quartet published the first book about the orchestra. Fania Fénelon was at least a decade older than most of the other girls in the so-called music block and, by all accounts, had an unusual musical memory if a less reliable one for events. She had arrived only in January 1944 but was much welcomed as “one of the few accomplished musicians in the group,” transcribing and arranging being an essential skill for the officially sanctioned orchestra to operate successfully.
Yet her book, first published as Sursis pour l’Orchestre, translated as The Musicians of Auschwitz, was a novelized and sensational account which appalled almost all the other members of the ragtag band. It was later turned into a film which roused several of the women to write their own memoirs of the orchestra. Among them was Anita, who went on to become the renowned musician Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, ninety-nine and living in London at the time of writing.
Anita and other surviving orchestra players felt especially that Fénelon, who died in 1983, had betrayed the memory of Alma Rosé, the Austrian Jewish professional violinist who had held the orchestra together as conductor before her own sudden death in April 1944 at the age of thirty-seven, probably from accidental food poisoning. In their view, Fénelon’s harshly negative portrayal of Alma ignored the degree to which Alma’s sometimes ferocious discipline enabled all the players under her baton to survive; for as Alma regularly reminded them, if they left the orchestra, they too would “go to the gas.”
There is a vast body of literature on many aspects of Auschwitz in general, and many individual accounts and memoirs of those who played in the “girls’ band,” as it was called at the time. But in writing about the orchestra now, I have tried to reflect not only the perspective of other prisoners who were forced to listen to the music while being denied privileges granted to the players—the most precious of all being the players’ fragile protection against being dispatched to the gas chambers—but also to make clear the views of the musicians themselves, some of whom had been forced to join under compulsion. They suffered during their captivity not only from the same hunger, cold and fear endured by the camp’s prisoners but, long after their release, from a different kind of nightmare and depression based on rage and despair as they agonized over their impotence. What else might they have done? What choices did they really have?
The essence of the conundrum was: “Should we protect our lives and play or refuse to play and doom ourselves to a harsher life, or even to death?” as one of the non-Jewish Polish musicians expressed it. Other prisoners imagined that the musicians were so-called “prominenten” or “big shots” who were shown favors and lived in “silky conditions.” The truth was that in practical terms they had very little beyond a bunk and a blanket, both of critical importance, to differentiate themselves. But, as long as they played well and were therefore useful to the Nazis, they had an identity beyond a number and with it a chance to survive. This alone was enough to ensure they were despised by others.
The Nazi use of music in the death camps has many explanations. The Germans saw themselves as a cultured people and yet during the war they used music as an additional tool of torture.
In Nazi nomenclature, the women of the orchestra were a work kommando, or squad, whose job was to make the other prisoners march faster out to work and back in again in rows of five, thus making them easier to count. If the women’s playing or practicing near the station platform had the effect of calming arriving prisoners into a false sense of security as they clambered off the train, that was an additional benefit. And if their playing also had the effect of sowing discord among other inmates who saw these relatively well-dressed women as collaborators, the Nazi guards did not object.
Clearly, the Nazis also wanted to humiliate the musicians in their use of music as a further tool of violent assault. The female musicians, because they were excused work in other kommandos and were always practicing in their block or performing at the entrance gate, witnessed the arrival of thousands of desperate people, the cries of children mingled with the shouts of SS men, wild barking of dogs and snatches of sentimental songs. In this way they were forced to provide the backdrop to murder. Lily Mathé, one of the orchestra’s best violinists, vividly remembered being made to play jolly tunes in the SS officers’ mess at Auschwitz every evening while the guards ate their dinner. Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief perpetrators of the Holocaust, was a regular witness to the mess during his frequent visits to Auschwitz in 1944 to check on how the mass extermination of inmates was progressing. “Eichmann used to drink a lot and would delight at waving chicken bones before our hungry eyes and contemptuously throwing one at us to grovel for,” Lily remembered.
It is plain from their postwar testimonies that Lily and all the other orchestra players despised their captors. The fact that there were also frequent internal arguments between different musicians and factions within the orchestra should not obscure this important point. Indeed, it seems a fitting prelude to this complicated, often discordant story that both aspects of the orchestra were on display that evening in early 1944, a few months before Lily arrived at Auschwitz, when the quartet launched into the first bars of the Pathétique sonata. The mere act of playing this sublime music for their own delight was also an act of defiance against their SS guards.
However, the quartet never finished the piece. They stopped when the Polish Aryan violinist, Helena Dunicz, playing among three Jews, suddenly refused to continue. Recalling the moment in her 2014 memoirs when she was almost ninety-nine, she could no longer remember the precise circumstances. She simply remarked how unhappy she was that the private performance had ended so abruptly, because it had reminded her of her pre-war life in Lwów, when she had played chamber music with her brother and mother.
In 1996 Helena wrote more candidly to Anita of her deep regret at how the other Polish women in the orchestra did not want her to associate so closely with the Jewish girls who were players. Helena had to choose between the strong support she derived from being part of the Polish Christian group within the orchestra, with their small privileges as non-Jews, or mixing with the Jews for the sake of the quartet. She lamented to Anita that she had not felt strong enough to argue with her fellow Poles. “Because of the solidarity with others I had to stop…I felt very unhappy to behave in such a style. As I was very timid since my birth and horrified in the camp, I didn’t feel strong enough to intermediate [sic].” Anita, reflecting on the debacle today, still shakes her head in sorrow.
I have been gripped by a need to understand more not only about the women in the Auschwitz orchestra…but also what hearing music in this inferno meant to the other prisoners.
Yet when they performed together, the Poles and the Jews did put aside their differences to present a common orchestral front against their jailers, playing to the best of their varying abilities to save each other’s lives.
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I had long been aware of the existence of the women’s orchestra through my professional research into other Holocaust stories. But I had never connected the orchestra with my own father’s wartime story. Yet as I read more about the women’s experiences and learned how some of them had been transferred at the end of 1944 to another camp at Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany, I decided it was time to research the role of my father, who had been part of the British forces liberating Belsen a few months later.
As the Allies advanced across Europe, the Germans destroyed what they could of Auschwitz and other camps, burning documents and hoping not to leave a trace of their atrocities. With the imminent approach of the Russian army, the Nazis force-marched survivors out of the camps on what are now known as the death marches. Weakened stragglers were shot or simply collapsed and died on the road.
On November 1, 1944, the Auschwitz women’s orchestra suddenly stopped performing, on Nazi orders. Its Jewish musicians were transported by train to Bergen-Belsen while two and a half months later the remaining non-Jewish players were sent to the only all-women camp at Ravensbrück, 90 kilometers north of Berlin, marching in freezing winter conditions with no food.
My father was a thirty-two-year-old tank commander who had crossed to occupied France shortly after D-Day, fought in the savage battle for Caen and then on through northern France. In April 1945 he and his regiment reached Belsen shortly after its liberation. Even though he had been in uniform for seven years, having joined the Territorials in 1938, nothing my father had seen could have prepared him for this horror. Thousands of skeletal creatures were lying on bunks unable to move, while dead bodies were piled in heaps all around the camp, reeking of putrefaction. Recently promoted to major with the role of quartermaster general, my father was in charge of all procurement. He was also responsible for keeping the official regimental diary in which he discussed the position of “displaced persons,” as they were now described—specifically, those camp survivors who had no homes to return to and were not allowed, or were unwilling, to go to Palestine, then run by a British mandate.
When I was growing up in England in the 1950s and 1960s, I could never talk to my father about what he had seen because he would immediately shut down any discussion of Belsen, feeling it was too gruesome a conversation for a young family. All that remains for me are memories of whispered conversations between my parents involving the strange word “Belsen.”
Yet one day in January 2022, long after my father’s death in 1997, I found a thin little file in Britain’s National Archives—the Regimental War Diary, with his unmistakable signature, Maj. Eric Rubinstein, 31st Armored Brigade. Against the date of May 24, 1945, he had written: “7 R Tanks with Crocodiles burning BELSEN camp.”
What did this mean? Once all the prisoners had been moved out of their huts and housed in other accommodation in the camp, the disease-ridden buildings were razed to the ground using powerful flamethrowers fired by Churchill Crocodile tanks to prevent the spread of further infections. The tanks could throw roaring jets of flame more than 100 meters, much farther than a man-carried flamethrower, supplied by an armored trailer which was towed behind carrying 400 gallons of fuel.
No wonder that Anita Lasker-Wallfisch still vividly remembers this day of destruction. She was in that crucible of hell along with a handful of other Jewish survivors from the orchestra when my father also witnessed the flamethrowers at work. In her 1996 memoir, Anita recalled watching the flamethrower tanks destroying the huts and described her many interactions with British officers. One such officer, she wrote, had made it his duty “since he is in charge of the stores” to get Anita and her sister Renate properly outfitted for their work as interpreters. Could that possibly be my father, whose job it was as brigade QMG to procure provisions?
Apart from Anita, other remnants of the women’s orchestra who had been removed from Auschwitz to Belsen included the Hungarian violinist Lily Mathé, her compatriot the singer Eva Steiner, the Dutch pianist Flora Jacobs and the music copyist Hilde Grünbaum, a close friend of the conductor Alma Rosé, and the two Greek sisters, Lili and Yvette Assael. On May 24, 1945, the same day that the flamethrowers went into action, Lily and Eva performed in a Red Cross concert at Belsen, presumably in the evening after the destruction. It seems possible, even likely, that my father attended. Tantalizingly, I shall never know, but ever since I discovered my father’s proximity to these events, I have been gripped by a need to understand more not only about the women in the Auschwitz orchestra, how they survived and at what cost, but also what hearing music in this inferno meant to the other prisoners and how we should think today about this additional attempt to degrade what it means to be human.
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From The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival by Anne Sebba. Copyright © 2025. Available from St. Martin’s Press, a division of Macmillan.
