If Music Be the Food of Love, Play On.

                                              Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

                                              The appetite may sicken, and so die

Anita Lasker-Walfisch
Born 1925

 I wrote and published a blog on Auschwitz-Birkenau and Anita Lasker-Walfisch on August 11^th, 2024 prompted after seeing Zone of Interest, but I have just seen The Musician of Auschwitz, again with Lasker-Walfisch as a heroine among others, issued to mark the 80^th anniversary of the camp’s liberation on January 25th 1945, and it has set me thinking specifically about music and the Holocaust. Lasker-Walfisch was the daughter of a lawyer, whose mother was a fine violinist; theirs was a prosperous Jewish middle class family well-integrated into German society. The best place to live for Jews in the 1930s was Germany until in 1933 it began to be less safe. That was when the Nazis were voted in and they worked incrementally over the next few years, to debase the Jews with the so-called 'mysterious stigma' pushing them to the edges of society, moving from debarring Jews from sitting on public benches, using libraries and theatres, to the eventual stigmata of the compulsory yellow star to be worn by all Jews, with all property-owning rights and most freedom of movement removed.

Anti-Jewish agitation on a German street,
1930s

From 1938, the Nazis rounded up Jews, stripped them of their dignity and possessions, imprisoned them in specially built concentration camps, starved and over-worked them to lead inexorably to widespread deaths; over 6 million Jews died between 1939 and 1945 plus numerous European Sinta, Roma and homosexuals, their numbers magnified after 1943 by the gas ovens which operated day and night for years.  And after the gassing came the incineration. These huge non-Aryan groups were seen as polluting the master German race. And yet the Germans were arguably the most cultured nation in Europe before WW2 and their national musicians and composers like Mahler, Mendelsohn and Schumann were worshipped and hugely celebrated by their fellow citizens, as were international musicians like Bizet, Gounod, Saint-Saens, Berlioz. So, the Nazis’ desire to have classical music provided for their officers was almost understandable if one overlooked the striking paradox of the wartime context. The desire to provide music for their myriad doomed prisoners was less clear; perhaps it was mere celebration as the Nazis proceeded to achieve their murderous aim.

 Among the inmates of concentration camps were some of Europe’s most talented musicians. Perhaps 600 shaven headed, emaciated Jewish prisoners would be sent out each day from a typical camp to work, on starvation rations, with as few as 300 slave labourers surviving to return each evening. But as they left and returned, one of the 15 orchestras in Auschwitz would be there, doomed to spend the long day outside in all conditions, to play out the workers and welcome them back, often with joyful,

The notorious Mauthausen concentration camp.
Orchestra forced to play
while leading fellow prisoner to his execution. 1943

rhythmic marches. Anita Lasker-Walfisch commented in the film, that on arrival, when stripped naked with shaven head and tattooed arm, among the crowd of similarly bereft prisoners, she happened to comment that she was a musician. One of the guards asked what instrument she played. “A cellist?! Who did you study with?” She enjoyed the incongruity of the conversation despite the context.

Women's small orchestra in one of the camps.
The women's shaven heads are covered; the conductor
with hair is a 'trusty'; not a guard but a reliable prisoner

 But to be a musician in Auschwitz with its 15 orchestras meant that there was a better chance of survival, at least for longer, rather more than the ‘normal’ three-month duration of Jewish prisoner life. The Nazis enjoyed the music, irrefutable proof of their cultural superiority and the orchestras provided endless concerts for the S.S. as well as for the daily work marches for the Jews, and to accompany the floggings, but the music served also for the Nazis, to celebrate the Jewish path to death. For some prisoners, at the beginning and end of each punishing day, the orchestra might give a few moments of escapism, or of solidarity as they hummed together or sang almost mutely in the forbidden Yiddish. For others the music equalled sadism, they needed food, not entertainment. Unofficial use of music was enjoyed during lockdown in the camps at night. Drunken SS officers would awake the musicians in the resident orchestra to play during the night, while more alcohol was consumed by the Nazis as they searched for sleeping prisoners to rape.

[Internationally-acknowledged large firms like I.G. Farben were persuaded to build bigger factories in Germany and Poland to take advantage of the limitless free slave labour available to propel this economic expansion of the Third Reich. The two main aims of WW2 for the Germans were the wholesale elimination of the Jews and the elevation of the Third Reich [projected to last for 1000 years] to the status of an economic super-power.]

Szymon Laks 1901-1983

Other musicians featured in the film; Adam Kopycinski, a Polish composer-pianist, played one of his own lullabies, optimistic and soothing, while Szymon Laks wrote concertos based on his heritage; some of his music when performed, resulted in the most plaintive and evocative singing. One day, when Laks was rehearsing the first movement of his Third String Quartet, which was based on Polish folk tunes, an SS guard came in, demanding to know the composer.  Carefully and erroneously, Laks gave the name of an obscure Austrian composer. “A beautiful quartet” the guard sighed. “One could tell it was German right away.”

Josep Mengele

Jewish child prisoners photographed specifically for Mengele

 There was mention of the notorious Dr. Mengele and his sadistic experiments on children, twins particularly, some tortured alive; on one occasion, he walked, the tragic irony unacknowledged, into Lasker-Walfisch’s barracks demanding Traumerei [Dreams] from Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen [Scenes from Childhood] but in the same film, a Jewish woman looking after a group of children all doomed to die, spoke approvingly of the Nazi guard who advised her to keep them calm and sing with them.” This will speed up their dying as they take deep breaths of gas and reduce their suffering.” Nazism was a mass killing machine but with an occasional almost human face.

Auschwitz was liberated on January 27^th, 1945, and after the Holocaust, the whole Jewish European world had effectively vanished. Language, culture, families and Shtetl, had vanished with few left to mourn the vibrant world that was lost. Indeed, all that was often left were the survivors and their music.   

Undated photo of a Jewish store in Vienna with anti-Semitic slogans
daubed on walls and windows; taken during the Thirties. Post-war,
Austrian authorities took more than 40 years to launch serious efforts
at returning Jewish property plundered by the Nazis

Pre-war street scene in an East European shtetl


Non-musical Holocaust post-script

Holocaust survivor, Margot Friedlaender.  Born November 1921. Now aged 103.
She warns of growing threats to democracy from the rise of far tight
parties in Europe.