Anne Sebba: The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz

Award-winning biographer and historian Anne Sebba presents an extraordinary and never before told account of the only entire female orchestra in any Nazi prison camps. 

In 1943, almost fifty women and girls from eleven nations were drafted into a hurriedly assembled band that would play marching music to other inmates, give weekly concerts for Nazi officers, whilst individual members were sometimes summoned to give solo performances of an officer's favourite piece of music. 

Anne has drawn on meticulous research and first-hand accounts from women including Alma Rosé, the orchestra's main conductor, niece of Gustav Mahler and a formidable pre-war celebrity violinist, to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, its teenage cellist and last surviving member. 

Her talk will also consider the tangled moral questions the orchestra raises. What role could music play in a death camp? What was the effect on those women? 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?