Active from 1943 | ||
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Similar Fania Fénelon, Alma Rosé, Microphone Mafia, Arnold Rosé, Raphael Wallfisch | ||
Jewish survivor anita lasker wallfisch on the auschwitz camp orchestra
The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, or the Girls' Orchestra of Auschwitz, was a female orchestra at Auschwitz concentration camp, which was created in Spring 1943 by order of the SS. The members were usually young female prisoners, of varying nationalities, who were spared regular camp labor in lieu of performing music that was regarded as helpful in the daily running of the camp.
Contents
History
The Mädchenorchester von Auschwitz (lit. "Girls Orchestra of Auschwitz") was first formed in April 1943 as a pet project of SS-Oberaufseherin ("SS chief supervisor") Maria Mandel, for the Germans who desired both a propaganda tool for visitors and camp newsreels, and as a tool for camp morale. It was led by a Polish music teacher, Mrs. Zofia Czajkowska, and remained small until May 1943 when Jews were allowed to be admitted. The members came from many countries, including Greece, Poland, Germany, the Ukraine and Belgium. Starting in June 1943, its primary role was to play (often for hours on end in all weather conditions) at the gate when the work gangs went out, and when they returned. The orchestra also gave weekend concerts for the prisoners and the SS and entertained at SS functions. They also played for sick prisoners in the infirmary, and were sometimes assigned to play when new transports arrived, or during selections.
In the early months, the ensemble consisted mainly of amateur musicians, with a string section, but also accordions and a mandolin, and lacked a bass section (having acquired their limited instruments and sheet music from the men's orchestra of the main Auschwitz camp). Since the musicians were all assigned to different barracks and work commandos, and with diverging schedules and could rarely all come together to rehearse. The repertoire of the orchestra was fairly limited, in terms of the available sheet music, the knowledge of the conductor and the wishes of the SS. The orchestra played mostly German marching songs, as well as the Polish folk and military songs that Czajkowska knew by heart. The orchestra also included two professional musicians, cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and vocalist/pianist Fania Fénelon, each of whom wrote memoirs of their time in the orchestra. Wallfisch, for example, recollected being told to play Schumann's Träumerei for Dr. Josef Mengele, while Fénelon's account, Playing for Time, was made into a film of the same name.
Czajkowska was eventually replaced as conductor in August 1943 by Alma Rosé, niece of Gustav Mahler, who had been the conductor of a women's orchestra in her hometown of Vienna. Rosé was considerably more experienced and sophisticated than most of the teenage girls in the orchestra, but continued to rely on Czajkowska for Polish translation. Rosé conducted, orchestrated and sometimes played violin solos during its concerts. Apart from the official activity, she had the band rehearse and play forbidden music by Polish and Jewish composers to boost the spirits of band members and fellow inmates they trusted. Rosé died suddenly but mysteriously, aged 37, in April 1944. Some sources state she died of food poisoning. After, the orchestra was conducted haphazardly by Sonia Vinogradovna, a Russian prisoner.
On 1 November 1944 the Jewish members of the women's orchestra were evacuated by cattle car to Bergen-Belsen where there was neither orchestra nor special privileges. On January 18, 1945, non-Jewish girls in the orchestra, including several Poles, were evacuated to Ravensbrück concentration camp. In January 1945 Auschwitz was dismantled and the orchestra was sent to Bergen-Belsen. Two members, Lola Kroner and Julie Stroumsa, died there. The rest survived, though Ewa Stojowska was badly beaten and Fania Fénelon nearly died of typhus. Fénelon wrote that the orchestra was scheduled to be shot to death on the same day as the liberation by British troops. She was interviewed by the BBC on the day of liberation and performed "La Marseillaise" and "God Save the King".
Conductors
Players
As of 2009, Esther Bejarano, Hilde Simha, Rivka Bacia (aka Regina Kuperberg), and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch are known to be among the last living survivors of the girl orchestra.
Films
Books
Perhaps the best known documentation of the orchestra is Fania Fénelon's vivid novel-memoir, "Playing for Time" (an English translation of "Sursis pour l'orchestre"). Many of the surviving members of the orchestra took issue with Fénelon's portrayal of Alma Rosé, who appeared in Fénelon's memoir as a cruel disciplinarian and self-hating Jew who admired the Nazis and courted their favor. A recent biography of Rosé, "Alma Rosé: From Vienna to Auschwitz," by Rosé family friend Richard Newman and Karen Kirtley, strives to present a different picture of the orchestra leader. It corrects several errors in Fénelon's account (Rosé was Austrian, not German) and subtler biases: Fénelon, for instance, was never the leader of the orchestra. As a Parisian of socialist sympathies, divorced, active in the Resistance, and formerly a student of Germaine Martinelli, she was considerably more experienced and sophisticated than most of the teenage girls in the orchestra, to whose immaturity she condescended; but there was never any doubt that Rosé was their leader. Nor, according to Newman and Kirtley, did Fénelon's and the other Jewish women's mistrust of the Christian Poles in the orchestra entirely reflect the truth: not all the Poles were anti-Semitic. But most significantly, Rosé emerges in her biography as a heroine who saved the lives of nearly all the women in her care by forcing them to work their hardest even if they were marginally talented, though her dramatic temperament and her egotism do not go unremarked.
Other potential sources of controversy were represented by Fénelon's novelistic rendering of her experience, with reconstructed conversations and thinly veiled name changes (Violette Jacquet became "Florette," Hélène Scheps and Hélène Rounder both became "Irene," Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was "Marta," and Fanny Birkenwald was "Anny"), and her frank treatment of both prostitution and lesbianism in the camps, with several alleged lesbian liaisons between orchestra members (toward which Fénelon was compassionate). Both the English and the German translations of her memoir were slightly abridged in respect to this last matter.