Violins of Hope (14 page)

Other performances were even more subversive. SS junior squad leader Heinrich Bischop would sneak into the music barracks during odd hours and ask a few of the musicians to play popular Jewish songs. During these visits, the musicians would play as quietly as possible and would post a guard at the door to make sure that nobody walked in on the prohibited music. Despite their best efforts to keep Bischop's love for Jewish music a secret, their clandestine performances were discovered and Bischop was redeployed from Auschwitz to the front lines of the war.

The irony that the German officers and guards were brutal bigots by day and sentimental lovers of forbidden music by night was not lost on the musicians. “The SS were quite crazy for this music. In the evenings we played this music for these people, who, to put it mildly, had been plaguing us all day long,” explained Henry Meyer. “What did we play for them? American melodies. The Americans were their biggest enemies. Who were the composers? Gershwin and Irving Berlin: Jews. Who played? Jews. And who listened and sang along with these schmaltzy songs until tears rolled down their faces? The members of the SS, our tormentors. What a grotesque situation.”
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While the members of the SS seem to have enjoyed the musicians' performances, the same could not always be said for their fellow prisoners. On Christmas Eve 1943, commander Schwarzhuber ordered a small group of musicians to play Christmas carols at the infirmary of the Birkenau Women's Camp. The musicians brought with them an arrangement of “Silent Night” as well as a selection of Polish carols. They started with “Silent Night” and had just started playing the first Polish carol before quiet weeping grew into deafening sobbing. “Enough of this! Stop! Be gone! Clear out!” the female patients cried shrilly in Polish, offended by the clumsy attempt to bring them comfort. “Let us die in peace!”
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In October 1944, several orchestra members were taken to the crematorium camp, where they gave a two-hour concert for the members of the Sonderkommando. This squad had aided in the disposal of captives who had died in the gas chambers. Its members' reward was a little music before they were sent to the gas chambers themselves. As a tribute to their fellow Jewish prisoners, the orchestra played some of the Jewish melodies of which Bischop had been so fond. Between the pieces, the musicians tried to talk with the members of the Sonderkommando, who responded with curses and profanities.

Sometimes, the musicians would simply perform for their own enjoyment. After picking up a piece of trash on the ground that turned out to be the sheet music to “Three Warsaw Polonaises of the Eighteenth Century,” Szymon Laks arranged the melodies for three instruments. Since Polish music had been forbidden by the Nazi regime, Szymon and two of his friends would play the polonaises in secret while the other orchestra members were out on their work details. If an outsider suddenly appeared in the music barracks, they would quickly switch to another piece that had been agreed on in advance. For Szymon and his friends, playing the polonaises was not just a way of remembering their homeland. It was a way to show that they would not completely bend to Nazi prejudices.

As the Red Army worked its way toward Poland, the ranks of the SS became smaller and less disciplined. Schwarzhuber himself once appeared in front of the orchestra reeling drunk. He yanked the baton from Szymon's hand, pushed him aside, and took his place in front of the ensemble.

“Now play ‘Fatherland, Your Stars,'” he commanded, raising the baton. The orchestra responded professionally, ignoring the clumsy gestures of the intoxicated commander.

Schwarzhuber was still conducting when the march ended. Clearly confused, he asked, “Can you play for me the ‘Internationale'?”

The musicians were shocked. Was the camp commander of Birkenau really asking them to play the Soviet national anthem?

“Unfortunately, we cannot play the ‘Internationale' because we do not have the music,” violinist Leon Weintraub wisely responded.

“And why don't you have the music yet?”

The orchestra just stared at him in silence.

“It doesn't matter,” Schwarzhuber finally conceded. “You'll soon have it.”
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Schwarzhuber was indeed rather sentimental about his orchestra. In November 1944, when the musicians were being transported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in preparation for the complete evacuation of Auschwitz, the camp commander pointed to them and sighed with both pride and regret, “My beautiful orchestra!”
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The orchestra in the Birkenau Men's Camp had a counterpart in the Women's Camp. Like the ensembles elsewhere in Auschwitz, the Birkenau Women's Camp Orchestra provided marching music for the work details as they marched out of camp every morning and back in every evening. The musicians also played at camp inspections, at the arrivals of transports, at the infirmary, and during Sunday concerts.

The women's orchestra was founded in April 1943 by Maria Mandel, who was the commandant of the women's camp. In its first month of existence, only female Aryans were allowed to participate. Jews were soon added to complete the ensemble. The orchestra started with just a bass drum and cymbals, but gradually grew to include mandolins, guitars, a few violins, a cello, a piano, and a few singers.

The absence of winds, specifically brass instruments, gave the women's orchestra a more intimate sound than the orchestra in the Birkenau Men's Camp. Despite the rivalry that emerged between the two ensembles and their Nazi patrons, the members of the orchestras regularly interacted with each other. Heinz Lewin, a Jewish violinmaker from Germany who was equally proficient on clarinet, saxophone, and double bass, would go into the women's camp twice a week to give bass lessons. The orchestras eventually adopted a practice of performing in each other's camp on alternating Sundays.

No examination of the Birkenau Women's Camp Orchestra would be complete without discussing its most famous member, Alma Rosé. Rosé came from one of the most distinguished families in Austro-German music. Her father was Arnold Rosé, the concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the leader of the famed Rosé String Quartet. Her uncle was the composer Gustav Mahler. Alma was herself a virtuoso violinist of great renown, for her solo playing as well as for her leadership of the Viennese Waltz Girls, a popular all-female ensemble that she had founded.

Rosé fled to London with her father after the German annexation of Austria in 1938, but naively left for Holland to resume her career as a performer. After Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, she found herself trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe. On December 14, 1942, after being ordered to report to the Westerbork Transit Camp, Rosé tried to escape to Switzerland by slipping through Belgium and France. She was arrested in Dijon four days later and was sent to the Drancy Internment Camp, where she was imprisoned for several months before being deported to Auschwitz in July 1943.

After reaching Birkenau, Rosé was appointed conductor of the Women's Camp Orchestra. Because of her stature within the classical music world, she was held in high esteem by the SS guards, who reverentially called her “Frau Alma.” Rosé was able to exploit her exalted status by recruiting Jewish musicians into the orchestra and by making sure that all of her musicians enjoyed special privileges such as permission to shower daily and new uniforms weekly. They also received more food and better accommodations, as well as lenient work assignments. As did Szymon Laks in the men's camp, Rosé was able to convince the administration of the women's camp to exempt the orchestral musicians from performing outside during inclement weather.

Rosé was even able to convince the Nazis to spare her musicians from selections. When mandolin player Rachela Zelmanowicz was in the infirmary with typhus—a death sentence for any other prisoner—Josef Mengele was prepared to send her to the gas chambers.

“What's with this one?” he asked during his rounds.

“She's from the orchestra.”
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Mengele continued on his way without any further discussion. As a member of Rosé's orchestra, Zelmanowicz was untouchable even by him. Her life was spared.

Given the low percentage of female orchestral musicians in the early twentieth century, it is not surprising that there were fewer professional musicians in the women's orchestra than in the men's orchestras of Auschwitz. To compensate for the relatively low levels of ability, Rosé rehearsed her ensemble tirelessly to improve the quality of both their performances and their repertoire. In addition to performing at the camp gate for two or three hours a day, the orchestra rehearsed eight hours a day, six days a week. Rosé knew that the fate of the musicians rested in the reputation of the ensemble.

Rosé died of mysterious causes on April 4, 1944. After ten months of dedicating herself to protecting all of the women in her orchestra, in the end she was unable to save herself. It is suspected that her death was caused by alcohol poisoning, but it is not clear whether the poisoning was accidental or intentional.

After Rosé's death, the orchestra's repertoire and duties were scaled back and its members were put back to work. The orchestra was dissolved in November 1944, when the non-Jewish members of the orchestra were transferred to the former men's camp. The Jewish performers were deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

There were a number of ensembles in Auschwitz in addition to the Main Camp Orchestra and the orchestras of the Birkenau Men's and Women's Camps. One was a small ensemble in the subcamp of Birkenau that was established in September 1943 to house transports of Czech Jews from the Theresienstadt concentration camp. This subcamp became known as the “Czech Family Camp,” because the prisoners were allowed to remain with their spouses and children instead of having their family members separated and sent to the Men's Camp, the Women's Camp, and the gas chambers.

As with their counterparts throughout Auschwitz, the men who made up the Czech Family Camp orchestra performed for marches and camp inspections. From time to time, they were also ordered to play during the public beatings of prisoners who had broken minor camp rules or who had been sadistically chosen at random. While the other detainees were forced to watch, the guards would make their victim take off his pants and stick his head into an access hatch on the side of the barracks. The guards would command the orchestra to start playing while they savagely whipped the victim's bare backside twenty-five to fifty times. On some nights, drunken guards would roar into the camp on their motorcycles. They would make the orchestra play while they drank, sang songs, and dragged young Jewish women off to rape.

The Czech Family Camp orchestra was disbanded in May 1944, when almost four thousand healthy men and women were sent to other camps. The seven thousand who remained behind were all killed in the gas chambers over two nights in June. After the camp was liquidated, twelve music stands that had been used by its orchestra were reappropriated to the Birkenau Men's Camp Orchestra, along with a few violins, a trumpet, and a cello. This was the first time that the ensemble in the men's camp had possessed a cello. They took full advantage of it by forming a string quartet.

The subcamp of Birkenau that was occupied by Roma in February 1943 had its own ensembles, including a jazz quintet and a band that played popular German songs. The “Gypsy Family Camp” was also home to the notorious laboratory of Josef Mengele, who decided to establish a Gypsy orchestra there after the success of his birthday party. Mengele assigned the task of convening the ensemble to Pery Broad, the SS section leader who regularly played jazz accordion with trumpeter Louis Bannet and other members of the Birkenau Men's Camp Orchestra. It had been Broad who had brought Louis to Mengele's birthday party in March 1943. Now Broad assigned Louis to train the Gypsy orchestra, which was composed of thirty Roma playing violins, accordions, mandolins, and guitars.

“Why should we play for the people who are going to murder us?” a suspicious Romani woman asked Louis at the beginning of the first rehearsal.

“I do not play for them,” Louis responded. “I play for me.”
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For the next few weeks, Broad escorted Louis to the Gypsy Family Camp almost every evening to rehearse the ensemble. On the day the orchestra had its debut, Louis found the Roma dressed in colorful costumes. Men swung from high bars and rings, children performed acrobatic tricks, and a woman walked a tightrope that was strung between two gasoline drums. As Louis led the orchestra in a rhapsody, Mengele stood on his laboratory steps watching the Roma sway and spin to the music.

At the conclusion of the performance, Louis asked Broad whether he would be returning the next day. “That won't be necessary,” Broad replied.
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The entire camp was sent to the gas chambers that evening.

After the Gypsy Family Camp was liquidated in August 1944, the Roma were replaced by more transports from Theresienstadt. Just days after the Gypsy orchestra had played for the first and last time, jazz guitarist Heinz “Coco” Schumann and a fellow prisoner picked up the leftover instruments and performed cabaret songs and operetta melodies for their new block elder. Schumann quickly formed a new orchestra with several other arrivals, including the surviving members of the “Ghetto Swingers” big band, which had been popular in Theresienstadt. If they could not find an appropriate instrument for someone, they would give him an instrument he could not play and have him fake his way through the performances. Sometimes a musician's life depended on his ability to fool the SS officers and guards. “We played music for sheer survival,” explained Schumann. “We made music in hell.”
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