Anne Sebba | The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival

Sat 26 Apr 2025 | 10:00am - 11:00am

Anne Sebba
Midge Gillies
Anne Sebba book

In The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, prize-winning biographer Anne Sebba unveils the astonishing and complex story of the female prisoners who were forced to play music for both fellow inmates and Nazi officers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 1943, the German SS officers ordered the formation of an all-female orchestra made up of nearly fifty women from eleven nations. While enduring the unimaginable horrors of the camp, these women were coerced into performing weekly concerts for Nazi officers and playing music for marching prisoners.

This orchestra was not just a cultural tool—it was a propaganda project, and for most of the women involved, playing in the orchestra was the difference between life and death. Sebba delves into the moral complexities of the situation, asking what role music could play in a death camp and the psychological toll it took on these women who were forced to provide solace to their oppressors.

Through meticulous archival research and exclusive first-hand accounts, Sebba tells the stories of these musicians, including the orchestra’s formidable conductor Alma Rosé, niece of Gustav Mahler, and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, the teenage cellist and last surviving member. As we mark the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, this sensitive and thought-provoking account illuminates the haunting legacy of the orchestra and the moral dilemmas faced by its members.

In conversation with Midge Gillies 

Venue: Palmerston Room

Duration: 1 hour

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Palmerston Room
  Anne Sebba | The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz Full Price
10am | 26 April | Palmerston Room at St John's
£17
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  Anne Sebba | The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz Concession (U25s, unwaged and those feeling the pinch)
10am | 26 April | Palmerston Room at St John's
£10
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Author Biography

Anne Sebba is a historian and an award-winning biographer who began her career as a Reuters correspondent based in London and Rome. She has written eleven works of non-fiction, mostly about iconic 20th century women, translated into a variety of languages including French, Polish, Czech, Japanese and Chinese, makes regular television and radio appearances and has presented two BBC radio documentaries about musicians. She is the author of the international bestseller That Woman, an acclaimed biography of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, and the prize-winning Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died Under Nazi Occupation. Her most recent book was Ethel Rosenberg, the Short Life and Great Betrayal of an American Wife and Mother, shortlisted for the Wingate award. Anne is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research and trustee of the National Archives Trust. She lives in London.  

Chair Biography

Midge Gillies is the author of ten works of non-fiction, many of them about the Second World War. In The Barbed-Wire University she examines the real lives of Allied Prisoners of War in a book that the Mail on Sunday described as “Brilliantly researched . . . and a deeply moving piece of social history”.Atlantic Furies, about the first women to fly the ocean, will be published by Scribe this October. She teaches a memoir course for Granta and is an assistant teaching professor at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education.