Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz

The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz or Girls' Orchestra of Auschwitz was a female orchestra at Auschwitz concentration camp created in June 1943 by a Polish music teacher, Mrs. Zofia Czajkowska, by order of the SS. The members were prisoner girls, whose membership in the orchestra protected them from being gassed in the gas chamber and from being worked to death. Czajkowska was eventually replaced as conductor by Alma Rosé, the daughter of Gustav Mahler's sister Justine and of Arnold Rosé. Rosé had been the conductor of a women's orchestra in her hometown of Vienna.

The orchestra played at the gate when the work gangs went out, and when they returned. During the final stages of the Holocaust, when the mass deportations of Jews from Eastern Europe occurred and large numbers of Jews were sent directly to the gas chambers, the orchestra played in order to put the minds of the victims at ease. The music preserved the illusion that the Jews were being transported "to the East", and allowed the SS to kill more efficiently. Fania Fénelon denies, in her book, the claim that the orchestra had to play certain specific selections, and calls this a myth. However, she recorded concerts for the SS, and reported that Maria Mandel was particularly fond of her rendition of Madame Butterfly.

On November 1, 1944 the women's orchestra were force-marched to Bergen-Belsen where was neither orchestra nor special privileges.[1]

Contents

Drama and Novels

The history of the orchestra has been told in memoirs, documentaries and one docudrama. The best known documentation is Fania Fénelon's vivid novel-memoir, "Playing for Time" (an English translation of "Sursis pour l'orchestre"). Though there is no doubting Fénelon's skill as a writer and her unsparing analysis of the concentration camp experience, many of the surviving members of the orchestra took issue with her 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 teenaged 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.

Rosé died in 1944 of unknown causes; poisoning was suspected by Fénelon and others, but according to Newman and Kirtley the cause was likely to be either botulism or typhus. After Rosé the orchestra was conducted haphazardly by Sonia Vinogradovna, a Russian prisoner, but in January 1945 Auschwitz was dismantled by the Nazis 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."

Members of the orchestra

As of 2005, Esther Bejarano, Violette Jacquet, Hilde Simha, Rivka Bacia (Regina Kuperberg), Masza Pietrkowska (died 1/1/09), Yvette Maria Assael-Lennon (died 7.2008) and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch are known to be among the last living survivors of the girl orchestra.

References

  1. ^ Mary Deane Lagerwey Reading Auschwitz p28 1998 "62) Fenelon remained in Auschwitz until November 1, 1944, when she and the entire women's orchestra were force-marched to Bergen-Belsen. At the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, where there was neither an orchestra nor special privileges."
Authors: Fania Fénelon Marcelle Routier
ISBN 0-689-10796-X.
Authors: Fania Fénelon Marcelle Routier
ISBN 0-689-10796-X.
Authors: Esther Bejarano Birgit Gärtner
ISBN 3-89144-353-6
Author: Esther Bejarano
ISBN 3-9265-3482
Authors: Richard Newman Karen Kirtley
ISBN 1-57467-051-4
Author: Anita Lasker-Wallfisch
ISBN 0-312-20897-9
Author: Gabriele Knapp
ISBN 3-928770-71-3
Author: Lilla Máthé
Author: Violette Jacquet-Silberstein - Yves Pinguilly
ISBN 978-2-35000-0162-3
Author: Jacques Stroumsa (mentions Julie Stroumsa)
ISBN 2-204-05914-5
Author: Jacques Stroumsa (mentions Julie Stroumsa)
ISBN 3-89191-869-0
Author: Mirjam Verheijen
ISBN 90 5546 011 7
Author: Rachela Olewski (Zelmanowicz)
ISBN 978-965-91217-2-4
Author: Jean-Jacques Felstein
ISBN 978-2849520949

Media

51'34 minutes in the discussion with Silke Behl. 22 January 2002
Northwest Radio See Links 1
Transmission cut from 24 January 2002 See Links 2

Films

References

  1. ^ Mary Deane Lagerwey Reading Auschwitz p28 1998 "62) Fenelon remained in Auschwitz until November 1, 1944, when she and the entire women's orchestra were force-marched to Bergen-Belsen. At the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, where there was neither an orchestra nor special privileges."

External links