It is said of concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau that they are places where even today, no birds sing. Indeed the more that we have learned about the Holocaust in the 80 years since the end of the Second World War, the more we have come to believe that there was no outlet for the creative arts.
However, as two remarkable films showing this month on British television illustrate, music played an important part in the life of Auschwitz. There was a cynical role — up to 15 orchestras were formed in the death camp, with members forced to play cheerful marches as slave labourers left for work and returned. Or random Nazi officers would wander into the prisoners’ barracks, and demand to hear a particular piece by a favourite composer. The musicians themselves, the majority of whom were Jewish, were terrified of playing the wrong notes, but benefited from the cruelty of the set-up by having slightly better food and conditions than their fellow prisoners.
And there was a private role for music, too, in which music was composed and played in secret, rebellious comfort for the prisoners, reminding them of the world that used to be — and the world they hoped would return.
The Sky Arts film The Lost Music of Auschwitz takes viewers through the incredible musical detective work of British composer and musician Leo Geyer.
Geyer, who is not Jewish, first visited Auschwitz when he was just 23, and was astonished to learn that the camp’s meticulously maintained museum contained fragments of music manuscripts composed by some of the prisoners.
Trumpeter from Krakow playing a Polish anthem which has been played for more than 700 years
Most poignant is Geyer’s present-day orchestra, which he has assembled to play the revived music. Because, in so many cases, the Auschwitz orchestras comprised people playing odd instruments such as the accordion, or the recorder — which were likely to have been the items a prisoner brought in with them — Geyer has arranged the music to reflect that. So we hear Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik played as it would have sounded at Auschwitz, played then by the camp’s women’s orchestra.
“This music was part of the infrastructure of the camp,” says Geyer. “Music was weaponised.” Susan Pollock, one of several Holocaust survivors giving testimony in the film, recalls hearing the “famous music” on arrival at the camp. “Suddenly we remembered that there was a world which we used to know.”
Geyer tells us that the barracks of the women’s orchestra, led by Alma Rosé, were sited next to the crematoria. It’s almost impossible to accept that the women’s relatives were being burnt to death, while they themselves strove to survive by playing music for the Nazis.
Jewish soprano Caroline Kennedy, many of whose family died in Auschwitz, performs a searing version of Chopin’s Tristesse, with lyrics and arrangement by Alma Rosé, and it is hard to hear it without tears.
In the BBC’s The Last Musician of Auschwitz, there are more powerful, raw performances, recreations of music played and sung in the camp.
Heartbreaking instances are songs written by a Czech Jewish woman, Ilse Weber, mother of two sons, Hanus and Tommy. She managed to save Hanus’ life by sending him to Britain with Nicholas Winton’s Kindertransport; but she and Tommy met their deaths in Auschwitz. We hear two of Weber’s compositions: And The Rain Falls, inspired by Hanus’ departure from Prague, and Wiegala, a poignant lullaby she sang to children to comfort them as they entered the gas chamber at Auschwitz.
Susan Pollack
The film tells the story of Polish political prisoner Adam Kopyciński, a conductor of the first orchestra at Auschwitz. We see a performance of his composition Lullaby — the rare handwritten manuscript of which still survives today. The piece is evocatively played at night in the grounds of the former camp commandant’s house, adjacent to the camp itself.
The life and work of Polish composer Syzmon Laks are also highlighted, with a haunting and powerful performance of the plaintive second movement of his Third String Quartet, based on Polish folk tunes. Andre Laks, his son, plays some of his father’s music.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch
But the “last musician” is in fact Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who survived Auschwitz because she was able to play the cello. Blessed with the dryest of dry wit, Lasker-Wallfisch, now 99, recalls that she was “interviewed” for a place in Alma Rosé’s orchestra while she was naked, having just arrived at the camp and been stripped along with all the other prisoners.
Lasker-Wallfisch survived the Holocaust and became a founding member of the English Chamber Orchestra, as well as founding her own family’s musical dynasty. We see her son, the professional cellist Raphael Wallfisch, playing Robert Schumann’s Traumerei (Dreams); his mother recalls that the notorious camp doctor, Josef Mengele, once commanded her to play the piece for him.
Perhaps most striking of all is an April 1945 BBC radio interview with 19-year-old Anita Lasker, just liberated from Auschwitz. Speaking in German, she says: “The few who have survived are afraid that the world will not believe what happened there. There, living healthy people were thrown alive into the fire… Music was always played alongside it. Music was played to the most terrible things.”
Ben Caplan
The film also highlights the Nazi persecution of Roma and Sinti people, sent in their thousands to Auschwitz, most of whom were murdered in the gas chambers. Musicologist Petra Gelbart, herself of Roma descent, performs There Is A Big House In Auschwitz, believed to have been first sung at the camp and passed down through her family.
Canadian folk musician Ben Caplan gives an emotional rendition of the Jewish Deathsong to end the film. A reworking of a traditional Yiddish folk song, devised by Berlin choirmaster Martin Rosebury D’Arguto in the days before he too was sent to Auschwitz, it testifies to the intended annihilation of the Jews. It speaks of a family of 10 brothers, but only the singer survives. The song was memorised by his friend Aleksander Kulisiewicz, who later shared it with the world, adamant it must never be forgotten.
The Lost Music of Auschwitz is on Sky Arts on 20 January. The Last Musician of Auschwitz is on BBC2 on 27 January.
