<p>“Why did I survive?” the cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch mused in one of my interviews with her about the extraordinary Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz. “I came to the conclusion that it’s better somebody survives to tell the story. I don’t feel too guilty about that.” She is still, at the age of 100, sharing her experiences.</p><p>Anita was a valuable member of the girls’ marching band, the name they gave themselves, because until she joined there were no bass instruments, but instead a motley collection of recorders, piccolos, mandolins, violins, an accordion and a guitar. At its height under Vienna-born conductor Alma Rosé, a niece of Gustav Mahler, approximately 43 women and girls were saved from being killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Almost all the musicians survived the camp, although two died from disease and malnutrition after they had been forcibly moved to Belsen in early 1945.</p><p>The Nazis had ordered the creation of the band in 1943 so that the other women prisoners – who had to work in the nearby factories or demolition squads – would march faster, making it easier for them to be counted in rows of five. It was the only all-female orchestra in any of the camps, prisons and ghettos run by the Nazis, and featured members from 11 different nations and a variety of political and religious backgrounds.</p><p>Although the women sometimes argued amongst themselves (mostly over food, or lack of it), they pulled together when they needed to perform. If they did not play well, they would be sent to the gas chambers.</p>
<img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/02-bf880dd.jpg" width="382" height="538" alt="The orchestra was conducted by Vienna-born musician Alma Rosé, a niece of Gustav Mahler. Tragically, the virtuoso violinist would not survive Auschwitz." title="The orchestra was conducted by Vienna-born musician Alma Rosé, a niece of Gustav Mahler. Tragically, the virtuoso violinist would not survive Auschwitz." />
<p>One of the themes in my book <em>The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz</em>, which was published earlier this year to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camps, is to examine what gave these women the desire to survive when they were surrounded by such suffering and brutality.</p><p>Many of the musicians had arrived in Auschwitz after seeing their parents, friends or siblings pulled into the line of those who were immediately gassed. Others had already been in prison for resisting or being Jewish, often tortured, before they were given a place in the music block. Some women were driven by a desire for revenge on those who had betrayed them; others by a desperate need to bear witness to what they had seen. But most simply wanted to live and taste a better life.</p><p>The orchestra, which played twice a day as the prisoners went in and out of work and rehearsed constantly during the hours in between, was no soft option. Yet I was only able to find one or two women who, if offered, refused a place in the group, recognising that it gave them a chance for life. When Alma Rosé needed a new accordion player, 150 women applied for the position.</p><p>Testimony from a woman like Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is gold dust for a historian. The story of why music flourished in a death camp is so impossible to believe that it almost needs a living witness as proof that it happened. While the Nazis were trying to eradicate Jews and obliterate Jewish culture, here they were preserving a small group of them. Anita is extraordinary not only in her longevity, but in her ability to articulate how the women felt at the time. “It was a luxury to feel anything,” she revealed during one of our interviews. “We just hoped to live until the next day.”</p><p>Although Anita always insists that survival was “a matter of luck”, she admits that being a cellist instead of a tattooed number restored a crucial element of humanity. She also maintains that the music was not what saved them, even if it did give them something to concentrate on amidst the brutality and killing. “We focused only on ‘would I still be alive tomorrow?’ from one day to the next. Nothing more.”</p><h3 id="astonishing-courage-39602fa1">Astonishing courage</h3><p>When I began my research, I believed that Anita was the only remaining survivor of the orchestra. However, due to an unlikely series of events (and an announcement in <em>The Bookseller</em> that I was working on the project), I was contacted by the granddaughter of another player to tell me that there was a second survivor, Hilde Grünbaum, living on a kibbutz in Israel. I immediately went out to visit her, and our interview was crucial in helping me understand the human will to survive in the direst of circumstances.</p><p>Grünbaum had such a strong moral certainty that she would survive and live to see better times that she declined a place on <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/membership/remembering-kindertransport-jewish-children-refugees-britain/">Kindertransport</a> to come to England. She also became the unofficial leader of the group when the women were transferred to Belsen (Alma Rosé had died of a sudden illness in April 1944), ensuring that everyone had their fair share of the meagre soup and bread rations.</p><p>When asked many years later about what drove her in such appalling circumstances, she was unequivocal: “I knew that if I didn’t do my best to help people then there would be nothing left.”</p><p>Meeting Hilde, by then aged 99, helped me understand the real privileges of the women in the musicians’ block. It wasn’t so much the pair of underpants and access to a toilet, important though these were, but the ability to hope. For Hilde, a passionate Zionist, this meant the hope that she could one day lead a better life in a new country where Jews would not face antisemitism.</p><p>Hilde never lacked courage, and just as the Jewish musicians were being forced onto the train for Belsen, she bravely dashed back into the music block to rescue some mementoes, as she knew the world would never believe what the women had been forced to do survive.</p><p>The items – Alma Rosé’s address book, a volume of Faust and a hand-sewn sheet music bag – are now in the collections of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem. Together, they represent an important part of any historian’s research into the orchestra.</p>
<img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/04-f031690.jpg" width="1200" height="801" alt="Hilde Grünbaum’s hand-sewn sheet music bag, which she kept at Auschwitz, is now in the collections of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem" title="Hilde Grünbaum’s hand-sewn sheet music bag, which she kept at Auschwitz, is now in the collections of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem" />
<h2 id="the-will-to-survive-75946eca">The will to survive</h2><p>There is no shortage of literature about the Holocaust, and there are several memoirs about the orchestra specifically. Many of the accounts date from the 1990s and were written in response to the television drama <em>Playing for Time</em>, which was itself based on a ghostwritten – and highly fictionalised – book by orchestra member Fania Fénelon (which should be viewed as more of a novel rather than a memoir).</p><p>There are also hundreds of filmed interviews available online, some curated by the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and others provided by Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. These moving testimonies – some of which were conducted with fellow prisoners who had heard the musicians play – were invaluable in trying to understand what it must have been like to feel cold, hungry and fearful, yet summon up the strength to perform music twice a day.</p><p>But while I have a proper reverence for archive material, there are few surviving diaries from Auschwitz. Access to writing supplies was limited, so many of the primary sources were actually recorded many years after the fact. People tend to remember the same events differently, and their accounts are more likely to be subjective.</p>
<img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/05-48201be.jpg" width="2291" height="3103" alt="Anne Sebba with Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who turned 100 in July 2025. The musician is still telling her story, more than 80 years after the end of the Second World War." title="Anne Sebba with Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who turned 100 in July 2025. The musician is still telling her story, more than 80 years after the end of the Second World War." />
<p style="font-weight: 400">However, I believe there is something vitally important about being able to interview those who witnessed the events first-hand. Every survivor I have spoken to has said that, unless you were there, you cannot imagine what it was like to feel fear, hunger and deprivation on this scale. I have tried to create a synthesis of all these sources in a bid to answer two key questions: were these ordinary women who transcended their circumstances because they never gave up hope in a better future? Or were they extraordinary women from the start?</p><p style="font-weight: 400">I can never know for certain, but I believe that sisterhood, group solidarity and small acts of kindness each played a part in strengthening both their will to survive and the qualities that make us human.</p><p style="font-weight: 400"><strong>Anne Sebba</strong> is an award-winning biographer, lecturer and journalist. Her most recent book is <em>The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival</em> (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025)</p>
