The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz

Author Anne Sebba
Narrator Anne Sebba, Helen Stern, Helen Stern
Publisher Orion
Publish Date 27 March 2025
Run Time 11 hours and 24 minutes
Format Audio
Genre History, Music, Second World War, The Arts, The Holocaust, Theory of music and musicology.

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What to expect

'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.

Critics Review

Impressive . . . Sebba's command of detail is superb. She quite rightly outlines the atrocities of the sadists, psychopaths and savages whom Auschwitz seemed to attract like a magnet; but also the resilience and courage of a group of women who refused to be beaten by evil, and used music to save their lives

TELEGRAPH

Deeply moving . . . This complex story pays fine tribute not only to the women's orchestra but also to their captive audiences, who remained as affected by the music as by the inhumanity that surrounded them

SPECTATOR

Deeply affecting . . . What makes The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz so powerful is its unswerving commitment to detail. Sebba ensures that every woman's name, every story, is documented. This is not a faceless tragedy, it is a collection of individual lives, each deserving of remembrance

MAIL ON SUNDAY

Remarkable . . . deft . . . A vivid account of the experiences of the 40 or so women who briefly came together to make the music that saved their lives. Running through this fine book is Sebba's empathy for the impossible moral choices presented to these young women

GUARDIAN

Meticulous research . . . a detailed picture of the orchestra's players. [A] remarkable story . . . The author has done these women proud

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

A carefully layered and vividly compelling picture . . . The vile moral maze in which Auschwitz operated, and the shocking possibilities of a casual advantage, are brilliantly covered here, along with the fundamentals of the story

IRISH INDEPENDENT

As a work of scholarship, it's a formidable achievement . . . Sebba doesn't judge individual motives. She presents conflicting perspectives even-handedly, and gives each of her subjects their own voice, even as she details - in unflinching clarity - the constant, often barely believable means by which their captors sought to strip them of their humanity

GRAMOPHONE

An extraordinary account of the musicians who literally played for their lives

JEWISH CHRONICLE

[A] harrowing and illuminating portrait of concentration camp life . . . Sebba writes without sensationalising. An indelible picture of this community of musicians and the ways in which they navigated the abject misery around them . . . scrupulously documented

THE HERALD

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

Pitch perfect . . . a symphony of a story, sensitively told and deeply researched. The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz reminds us of the power of music and art, and how the smallest good deed can change - even save - a life. May these women never be forgotten for their contribution to history

HEATHER DUNE MACADAM

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