The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz Skip to Main Content Macmillan Macmillan Books Books Top Sellers New Releases Award Winners Coming Soon View All Books View All Genres Kids Kids Top Sellers New Releases Award Winners Coming Soon Activity Guides Board Books Comics & Graphic Novels View All Authors & Events Authors & Events All Authors Events & Tours Publishers Publishers Celadon Books Farrar, Straus & Giroux Flatiron Books Henry Holt Macmillan Audio Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group The St. Martin’s Publishing Group Tor Publishing Group For Readers Book Clubs Reading Group Gold Blogs & Community Sites Criminal Element Fierce Reads Reactor The History Reader Work In Progress Stay Connected Newsletters & Alerts Recommendations Recommendations Holiday Gift Guide Read Banned and Challenged Books Empowering Black Voices Books by Trailblazing Women Narratives on Asian American, Native Hawaiian & Pacific Islander Heritage Pride in Every Page Summer Reading Stories of Latinx Heritage MacImpact Filter + Book details The Women's Orchestra of AuschwitzA Story of Survival Author: Anne Sebba; read by Helen Stern; epilogue read by the author Read Excerpt The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz Author: Anne Sebba; read by Helen Stern; epilogue read by the author 1We Did Not Feel Pain Anymore On September 1, 1939, German troops marched into Poland. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany as the invasion triggered the guarantees they had given to Poland, which was also attacked from the east by the Soviet Union, which in August had signed the Nazi-Soviet pact. Poland, an independent state since 1918, was swiftly partitioned, resulting in around one-third of the country’s estimated three million Jews finding themselves under Soviet rule. Thousands of Polish Jews fled eastward to avoid the Nazis and were mostly sent to work in labor camps in Siberia. Although conditions were brutal and anti-Semitism the norm, the Soviets saw the internees as useful forced labor in forests, mines and farms and did not follow the Nazi policy of deliberate genocide. Most of these relatively fortunate Polish Jews survived the war. Later in the war some Poles managed to enlist in special units such as the Polish Independent Carpathian Brigade, which went on to fight the Germans in North Africa. Other Poles in exile made substantial contributions to the Allied military effort throughout the war, fighting on land, sea and in the air in a variety of different theaters of war including the well-documented 145 Polish pilots flying under British command in 1940 during the Battle of Britain. Meanwhile, the rest of Poland’s Jews under Nazi rule were in mortal danger. The extermination of the Jews, while not yet an official Nazi war aim, began as soon as Hitler’s troops crossed the Polish border. SS operational units roamed through newly captured Polish towns, lining up groups of Jews for execution, indulging in random killings and setting fire to Jewish-owned businesses. These random killings rapidly escalated into systematic mass murder. By the end of 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazi killing squads had succeeded in exterminating tens of thousands of Jews in eastern Poland and the Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania, often aided by local communities with long-standing anti-Semitic hatreds. At the same time, the Nazis exported Germany’s existing concentration camp system into the conquered eastern territories to hold Jews destined for the gas chambers, as well as a vast range of other perceived enemies of the Third Reich across occupied Europe, from gypsies and Communists to nationalists and homosexuals. Auschwitz—the German name for the medieval Polish city of Oświęcim, home to many Jewish families—was the hub of this vastly expanded concentration camp network. On April 27, 1940, SS Commander in Chief Heinrich Himmler gave orders for the founding of a camp complex on the site of a former Austro-Hungarian army barracks just outside the city center, near a disused tobacco factory. The work of clearing and building was undertaken by prisoners sent for the purpose. This original camp, called Auschwitz I, or Stammlager, remained the nucleus and administrative center of the vast camp complex, its infamous gate proclaiming Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work Makes for Freedom”) becoming the ultimate symbol of the Holocaust. Auschwitz gradually evolved into a web of concentration and extermination camps as well as factories as the Jewish Holocaust gathered momentum. The network was situated in the southern Polish region of Upper Silesia, which was newly incorporated into Germany at the juncture of the Vistula and Sola rivers. Logistically, Auschwitz’s location was ideal for the Nazis’ purposes, because it stood at the center of major road and rail networks which would facilitate transporting large numbers of people there from multiple points of departure around Europe. Yet it was also to some extent isolated from the outside world, despite its good connections with the now German-run General Government of Poland and proximity to the former states of Austria and Czechoslovakia. The first commandant of Auschwitz I, Rudolf Höss, was an experienced thirty-eight-year-old SS officer who previously worked at the Nazis’ first concentration camp at Dachau, near Munich, and then at Sachsenhausen, which he headed from 1938 until his transfer to Auschwitz in May 1940. He was officially named commandant on May 4. At Auschwitz, Höss, his wife Hedwig and their four children lived in a comfortable two-story house with prisoners as domestic servants and a pretty garden within sight of the first crematorium. Three SS officers socialize at Auschwitz (from left to right): Richard Baer (commandant of Auschwitz), Josef Mengele and Rudolf Höss (the former commandant) For the first two years, Auschwitz was not in fact a concentration camp specifically for Jews. The original inmates were largely a mixture of male political prisoners and professional criminals drawn from across the greater German Reich, including Austria, Czechoslovakia and the annexed regions of western Poland. The first mass transport of prisoners, comprising 728 Polish men from Tarnow prison, arrived in Auschwitz on June 14, immediately after the Fall of France. They included Jews and Catholics, many of whom were arrested attempting to cross the southern Polish border to reach the newly formed Polish army in exile in France. As the influx of prisoners increased during these early months, Höss swiftly oversaw the establishment of Auschwitz II or Auschwitz-Birkenau, almost two miles from the initial camp. To make way for Birkenau, the village of Brzezinka and several surrounding smaller hamlets were demolished, evicting the local population of Poles and some Jews who still lived in the area. Birkenau, which took its name from the birch tree groves in the area, was in operation by March 1942, even though the camp was far from finished. It would become the site of the main crematoria and so-called gas “chambers,” rooms disguised as shower rooms and called morgues by the SS on their building plans. By now, the Nazis no longer needed to rely on slow and cumbersome mobile gas units to kill their victims, having perfected a method of rapidly slaughtering large numbers of people, predominantly Jews, with canisters of Zyklon B gas, a cyanide-based pesticide. Until 1942 the early Auschwitz camps were for men only. The first women began to arrive at the end of March 1942, soon including mothers with children who were dispatched immediately to be gassed. The surviving women were treated as slave labor and sent directly to work, mostly on demolition squads to clear space for expansion of the camp, without being quarantined or undergoing “selection,” the euphemism for the Nazi system of deciding on arrival in the camp who was fit enough to work and who should be immediately gassed. There were rapidly proliferating sub-camps, some within marching distance of the main Auschwitz railway station. Many prisoners at these sub-camps were “sold” as slave labor to German industry, aiding the war effort. The largest of these Auschwitz slave factories, which eventually numbered forty, was the Buna synthetic rubber plant at Monowitz, established in October 1942 and known as Auschwitz III. It was run by the chemical conglomerate I G Farben and although the working conditions at Buna and other Auschwitz factories were brutal, prisoners who could tolerate the regime were at least safe from being selected for extermination. For Auschwitz had become by the end of 1942 the largest of all the Nazi extermination centers, whose camps and sub-camps covered an area of approximately 40 square kilometers, the whole described as an “interest zone” by the Germans. In the summer of 1941, Himmler had informed Höss that Auschwitz had been chosen as a key location for the mass extermination of the Jews and by January the following year the plan that the Nazis came to describe euphemistically as the Final Solution was formalized by a small group of senior Nazi officials, including SS Lt Col. Adolf Eichmann, who specialized in “Jewish Affairs.” Meeting at an impressive lakeside villa a few miles outside Berlin, the conference agreed that the remaining Jews in Europe would no longer be allowed to emigrate; they would instead be exterminated. The Wannsee Conference was chaired by thirty-seven-year-old Reinhard Heydrich, who used the event to assert his own authority over the process of systematic Jewish annihilation, which from now on was to replace randomized killing. This had been a fundamental plank of Hitler’s worldview and manifesto. In less than a day it was agreed that the entire population of Europe, whose Jewish contingent was estimated by Heydrich to stand at about eleven million, including countries which Germany did not then occupy such as Britain and neutral nations such as Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal and European Turkey, would be made free of all Jews—Judenfrei or Judenrein. Heinrich Himmler was the most senior Nazi charged with overall implementation of the Final Solution and therefore overseer of the camps. Here, the Auschwitz women’s orchestra and its male counterparts enter this terrible narrative. Even as the Nazis committed themselves to eradicating all trace of the Jews, a core part of Jewish culture was being preserved at Auschwitz. Music was an integral part of life in almost all Nazi-run camps, although here the music was subverted, no longer allowed to give pleasure but used as an additional method of torture. While the Auschwitz orchestras included non-Jews, at least half of all the players were Jewish, a delicate balance which the Nazis kept a close eye on. The balance might easily have tipped over in favor of the Jewish members partly as a natural consequence of Jews being by far the largest prisoner group. But it also spoke to the centrality of music for so many Jews of all social classes, wherever they lived, from street performers with little or no formal training to accomplished professional players. Prayers in synagogues had been accompanied by music and chanting since ancient times while klezmer, sometimes referred to as Yiddish without words, was a style of folk music which originated during the Middle Ages among the Jewish people of Eastern Europe, Greece and the Balkans. It was most often played at celebrations such as weddings or bar mitzvahs and also had its own rich tradition which borrowed from Jewish cantorial music, Hasidic intoning and Yiddish theater. Music as a reaffirmation of humanity was now being used as an additional tool in the struggle to destroy it. The Auschwitz orchestras exposed the grotesque contradiction at the heart of the Final Solution—the Nazis’ inability to decide whether Jews were to be annihilated because they were the lowest of the low or because they ran the world in some form of evil conspiracy. An orchestra led by a Jew was a visible reminder of this confusion. In February 1942, a few weeks after the Wannsee Conference, the first transports of Jews deliberately destined for death arrived in Auschwitz I. These victims were immediately gassed on arrival with Zyklon B gas, their bodies later incinerated using the old crematorium in the main camp, a grassy mound over a bunker just beyond the commandant’s spacious family house and garden. In March, the killings were moved to nearby Birkenau, where a vastly bigger murder operation was being hurriedly organized. Initially two farm buildings, a red cottage and a white cottage, standing discreetly behind foliage and trees, were used as disguised gas chambers. After gassing, the corpses were taken out and buried in mass graves. Those prisoners involved in the burials, generally young fit male Jews, were then taken to the infirmary and killed with a phenol injection.1 A few months later construction began in Birkenau on four large, purpose-built structures to be used for extermination by gas, with associated crematoria. These buildings soon enabled the Nazis to kill on an industrial scale, leaving only ashes behind. The start of mass transports of male and female Jews to Auschwitz in 1942 created the need for a separate women’s camp. On March 26, the first mass transport of 999 prisoners from the all-female camp at Ravensbrück was tasked with setting up this new women’s camp at Birkenau. The Ravensbrück group, who were not Jewish, included German women classified as asocial or criminal, and a few political prisoners. They were assigned to take charge of the Jewish women who now flooded into Auschwitz, even though Birkenau was not yet ready to receive them. The same day, March 26, 1942, the first registered mass transport of 997* young Slovak Jewish women set off for Auschwitz, most of them rounded up under threat by the Nazi puppet government from their villages. They had no idea of what lay ahead, except that they were being sent away for some kind of public work service, and that if they did not comply then their parents, who for the time being remained, would suffer. Copyright © 2025 by Anne Sebba The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz $26.99 Digital AudioHardcovere-BookTrade Paperback Format Buy This Book From: Apple Books Audible Audiobooks.com Barnes & Noble Audio Google Play Libro.fm Spotify Reviews Reviews from Goodreads About This Book A 2026 Audie Awards finalist for Best Nonfiction Narrator! Moving and powerful, this is a vivid portrait of the women who came together to form an orchestra... Read More Genre Nonfiction On Sale 09/16/2025 Book Details A 2026 Audie Awards finalist for Best Nonfiction Narrator! Moving and powerful, this is a vivid portrait of the women who came together to form an orchestra in order to survive the horrors of Auschwitz. New York Times bestselling author of Les Parisiennes and That Woman: A Life of Wallis Simpson now examines how a disparate band of young girls struggled to overcome differences and little musical knowledge to please the often-sadistic Nazi overseers. In 1943, German SS officers in charge of Auschwitz-Birkenau ordered that an orchestra be formed among the female prisoners. Almost fifty women and girls from eleven nations were drafted into a band that would play in all weathers marching music to other inmates, forced laborers who left each morning and returned, exhausted and often broken, at the end of the day. While still living amid the harshest of circumstances, with little more than a bowl of soup to eat, they were also made to give weekly concerts for Nazi officers, and individual members were sometimes summoned to give solo performances. For almost all of the musicians chosen to take part, being in the orchestra saved their lives. But at what cost? What role could music play in a death camp? What was the effect on those women who owed their survival to their participation in a Nazi propaganda project? 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? In The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, award-winning historian Anne Sebba traces these tangled questions of deep moral complexity with sensitivity and care. From 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, Sebba draws on meticulous archival research and exclusive first-hand accounts to tell the full and astonishing story of the orchestra, its members, and the response of other prisoners for the first time. A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press Imprint Publisher Macmillan Audio ISBN 9781250417732 Reading Guide Organize a Book Club Reading Guides for The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz Discussion Guide Download Now In The News "The research is prodigious, the stories gripping. [The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz] deepens all that we know and shows that examining one subset of the victims of Auschwitz only enhances our understanding of life within the camp – life and death, murder and rescue." —Dr. Michael Berenbaum, Former Project Director US Holocaust Memorial Museum "Pitch perfect. Sebba has written a symphony of a story, sensitively told and deeply researched. The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz reminds us of the power of music and art, and how the smallest good deed can change a life, even save a life. May these women never be forgotten for their contribution to women’s history." —Heather Dune Macadam, author of 999: The Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz "One of the most poignant stories to emerge from the horror of the death camps, it is beautifully told by Sebba with her customary sensitivity and eye for telling detail. A book you will never forget." —Julia Boyd, Sunday Times bestselling author of Travellers in the Third Reich "Anne Sebba brings meticulous research and brilliant writer’s eye to one of the darkest questions of World War Two. What would you do to survive and what might be the price?" —Anthony Horowitz, New York Times bestselling author of Close to Death “In this superb and timely book about an extraordinary, and often overlooked slice, of WWII history, Sebba succeeds in presenting complex, conflicting and challenging questions... Rigorously researched and elegantly written, this is the biography of the women's orchestra of Auschwitz we need. Magnificent.” —Kate Mosse, New York Times bestselling author of The Taxidermist's Daughter "Anne Sebba tells this harrowing story with tremendous rigour and care, capturing both the complex horror of the women’s situation and the dignity and bravery with which they faced it. An impressive, important, deeply moving book" –Sarah Waters, New York Times bestselling author of Fingersmith "If you read just one book about Auschwitz and the holocaust, make it this." —Sir Anthony Seldon, award-winning author of Truss at 10 "These are things and people I care deeply about, and learning more about and re-visiting them in this way has been, quite simply, a balm to my spirit in these troubled times." —Dr. Susan Eischeid, author of Mistress of Life and Death: The Dark Journey of Maria Mandl, Head Overseer of the Women's Camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau "Anne Sebba’s groundbreaking study The Women’s Orchestra Of Auschwitz reminds us of the sheer insanity, perversity and uniqueness of the Holocaust – where some of Europe’s most accomplished citizens, its Jewish musicians, were made to play music as they witnessed their relatives and fellow Jews being gassed." –Tom Gross, former foreign correspondent for The New York Daily News “An important record of the incomprehensible cruelty perpetrated in Auschwitz, using music as an instrument of torture. But for those who played, it was a path to survival.” ―Victoria Hislop, bestselling author of The Island “An important book, powerfully written, carefully researched. The frightening and discordant notes of Auschwitz can be he heard through an ensemble of compelling voices, voices we must never forget.” ―Thomas Harding, author of The Einstein Vendetta “Meticulous research . . . a detailed picture of the orchestra's players. [A] remarkable story . . . The author has done these women proud.” ―Caroline Moorehead, Times Literary Supplement “Remarkable . . . deft . . . A vivid account of the experiences of the 40 or so women who briefly came together to make the music that saved their lives. Running through this fine book is Sebba's empathy for the impossible moral choices presented to these young women.” ―Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian, “Book of the Day” "Profoundly moving and rigorously researched Essential reading for anyone interested in Holocaust history, resilience, and the enduring human spirit." ―Library Journal, starred review “An important and heartbreaking contribution to Holocaust history.” ―Kirkus Reviews "Nuanced and unsettling... A chilling account of the sublime being twisted to inhumane ends." ―Publishers Weekly "Remarkable... Sebba’s command of detail is superb. She quite rightly outlines the atrocities of the sadists, psychopaths and savages whom Auschwitz seemed to attract like a magnet; but also the resilience and courage of a group of women who refused to be beaten by evil, and used music to save their lives." —The Telegraph “Deeply moving . . . This complex story pays fine tribute not only to the women's orchestra but also to their captive audiences, who remained as affected by the music as by the inhumanity that surrounded them.” ― Clare Mulley, The Spectator "In this deeply affecting book, Sebba reconstructs the experiences of the women, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who played in the orchestra in Auschwitz-Birkenau.... Powerful.... this book reminds us that extremism does not emerge in a vacuum and that dehumanization can happen in increments." —The Scottish Mail on Sunday “A carefully layered and vividly compelling picture . . . The vile moral maze in which Auschwitz operated, and the shocking possibilities of a casual advantage, are brilliantly covered here, along with the fundamentals of the story.” ―Irish Independent “An extraordinary account of the musicians who literally played for their lives.” ―Jewish Chronicle “A compelling biography.” ―WI Life “Meticulously researched... a harrowing tale of complex moral questions and remarkable human endeavor.” ―Arts Society Magazine “A well-researched study… also a testimony to the strength of female solidarity in the most wretched circumstances.” ―The Independent "Harrowing and illuminating... Sebba writes without sensationalising, leaving the stomach-churning facts to speak for themselves... A devastating glimpse into the nature of the concentration camps, and an indictment of the world’s response on learning what the Nazis had done." -The Herald "[Sebba] presents conflicting perspectives even-handedly, and gives each of her subjects their own voice, even as she details – in unflinching clarity – the constant, often barely believable means by which their captors sought to strip them of their humanity... As compelling as it is horrifying." ―The Gramophone Show More Show Less About the Creators Author Narrator The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz $26.99 Digital AudioHardcovere-BookTrade Paperback Format Buy This Book From: Apple Books Audible Audiobooks.com Barnes & Noble Audio Google Play Libro.fm Spotify Reviews Reviews from Goodreads About About Us Careers Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Contact Us Code of Conduct Code of Ethics for Business Partners News & Press Publishers & Distribution Clients Sustainability Help Catalogs Academic & Library Services Alternate Format Request Bookseller Services International Sales Special Markets Permissions Request Form Publishing Fraud Alert Newsletter Signup United States United Kingdom Canada Other Select Your Country* Your Email Address* A valid Email is required. 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