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  By October 1942, Szymon Laks had become the chief arranger for the Birkenau Men’s Camp Orchestra. Since commander Schwarzhuber insisted that his orchestra continually expand its repertoire, Szymon would re-create existing marches from memory and compose new marches in the German style. From time to time, Schwarzhuber and his subordinates would pass along the melodies of popular marches such as “Fatherland, Your Stars,” a march that served as the leitmotiv for a popular propaganda film. Szymon would harmonize these songs and orchestrate them for the ensemble.

  As Schwarzhuber and his subordinates continued to request more and more music, the orchestra members struggled to learn so many pieces. At Szymon’s suggestion, Kopka successfully petitioned Schwarzhuber to excuse the entire orchestra from their labor details for two rehearsals per week. This gave all of the musicians brief reprieves from the grueling work detachments, if only for three hours at a time twice a week.

  One day, the orchestra received an order from Schwarzhuber to start performing the popular march “Berlin Air” as soon as possible. Szymon completed the arrangement and the creation of the parts in a matter of days. When the orchestra played the arrangement for the first time, it just so happened that the Sonderkommando (special detachment) was marching by. Because the Sonderkommando was in charge of carrying decomposing corpses to the crematorium, the unit gave off a terrible odor that took several minutes to dissipate. The members of the orchestra were accustomed to the smell and did not think twice about it. The SS guards, on the other hand, immediately noticed the concurrence of the stench of death and the performance of “Berlin Air.” A shrill whistle and a shout from the watchtower brought an abrupt end to the performance. Kopka was summoned to the guardhouse, where he received twenty-five blows to his backside for mocking the German capital.

  Szymon’s arranging responsibilities were complicated by the fact that the ensemble kept changing. Its members continued to fall victim to disease or grow so weak from exhaustion and starvation that they were sent to the gas chambers. Others committed suicide.

  Among those who decided to take his own life was Leon Bloorman, a former violin professor at the Jewish Conservatory of Music in Rotterdam. Just a few days after arriving in Birkenau, Bloorman approached his old violin student Louis Bannet, who had since become a virtuoso trumpeter.

  “Louis, do you know what they made me do today?” he asked. “They made me play my violin while they hanged a man. He was a Frenchman. Other than being a Jew, I don’t know what crime he committed.

  “They pulled him on a cart to the gallows. I had to stand behind him and play La Marseillaise,” Bloorman continued, referring to the French national anthem that he was forced to perform to mock the executed Frenchman. “Can you explain such a thing to me?”

  “I don’t have an answer,” Louis simply responded. “There are no answers here.”

  “Louis, you are stronger than me,” the elder violinist tearfully admitted. “I don’t think I can go on like this much longer.”

  “Try to think of this,” Louis suggested. “The man they hanged today, the last sound he heard was your beautiful playing.”

  This was not enough to console the violinist. A few nights later, Bloorman tried to kill himself by running into the electric fence. Before he got that far, he was gunned down by SS guards who were sparing themselves the trouble of scraping his body off the fence. The next morning, when the orchestral musicians took their seats, they found Bloorman’s dead body tied to his chair. Around his neck hung a sign that explained why he had been shot and why his body had been positioned there as an example. The sign read, “I tried to escape.”47

  Szymon Laks eventually succeeded Kopka as the capo of the orchestra. In his new position, he was able to offer more protection to the orchestra members. He convinced the camp administration to assign them the easiest work details, arguing that they would be able to perform better if the nimbleness of their hands and fingers were not compromised by difficult manual labor. During a snowstorm, Szymon successfully argued that the camp instruments would be damaged if they were not taken inside immediately. From that point on, the orchestra was exempt from playing during bad weather.

  As the orchestra grew in size, quality, and repertoire, its responsibilities expanded beyond just performing at the gate to playing at various camp functions. On Sunday afternoons, the orchestra would perform concerts of light classical music for SS officers and guards. The orchestra would occasionally perform as transports arrived. Seeing an orchestra playing in front of a manicured lawn landscaped with flowers tricked the new arrivals into believing that Auschwitz was a welcoming place. In perhaps its most gruesome performance, the orchestra once played next to a building in which women prisoners were being gassed, to drown out their screams.

  From time to time, small groups of musicians would cheer up their sick comrades in the infirmary by playing classical music for them on Sunday afternoons. One patient was so grateful for Jacques Stroumsa’s performance of a Mozart violin concerto that he wept openly when he bumped into Jacques thirty-six years later at a café in Israel. “Jacques, it is really you!” he exclaimed. “Jacques Stroumsa, the violinist from Auschwitz who came to us on Sundays in the hospital to play Mozart!”48

  Various ensembles also played at birthdays and other holidays celebrated by camp functionaries and SS men. Three or four musicians would rise early to wake up the celebrant with a serenade or triumphant march. After the honored party feigned surprise and thanked his serenaders with gifts, the musicians would perform a sentimental tune and convey their best wishes in whatever language was appropriate to the celebrant. That evening, a larger ensemble would perform a private concert, while the hero of the day ate and drank himself silly.

  On the evening of March 16, 1943, Louis Bannet was rousted out of his bed along with a clarinetist, a drummer, and a violinist. They were loaded into a car and told that they would be providing entertainment for a birthday party. They were driven to a large country house, dropped off in the back, and taken to a second-floor loft. The balcony overlooking the first floor was screened off with large plants so the prisoners would be heard but not seen. After a German soldier told them to begin playing, Louis snuck a peek at the guest of honor as he jubilantly entered the room. The birthday boy was none other than Josef Mengele.

  The celebration of Schwarzhuber’s birthday on August 29, 1943, was an even bigger affair. The musicians were released from work detail for the three days prior to the celebration to prepare. To honor the camp commander, four trumpets played a regal fanfare that had been composed specifically for the occasion, just as Schwarzhuber stepped out of his car with his wife and two small children. The commander saluted smartly as the orchestra launched into “Fatherland, Your Stars.” Szymon later recalled that Schwarzhuber and his family barely noticed the procession of thousands of recent camp arrivals marching to the gas chambers.

  Through their performances, the musicians of the orchestra were able to curry favor with camp functionaries. Albert Haemmerle, an otherwise particularly monstrous block elder, called on the orchestra to relieve his heartbreak after a charming young Polish boy broke up with him in favor of another camp functionary. Haemmerle would take every opportunity to visit the orchestra and ask them to play romances and sentimental melodies for him while he drowned his sorrows in alcohol. In return, he spared the musicians from his fury and even brought them gifts.

  More important to the orchestra members than their relationships with camp functionaries was the way in which music forged personal connections with their SS captors, whom they called “esmen.” “When an esman listened to music, especially of the kind he really liked, he somehow became strangely similar to a human being. His voice lost its typical harshness, he suddenly acquired an easy manner, and one could talk with him almost as an equal to another,” Szymon wrote in his memoirs. “Sometimes one got the impression that some melody stirred in him the memory of his dear ones, a girlfriend whom he had not seen for a long time, and then h
is eyes got misty with something that gave the illusion of human tears. At such moments the hope stirred in us that maybe everything was not lost after all.” The irony of such barbarians having so much appreciation for beauty was not lost on Szymon: “Could people who love music to this extent, people who can cry when they hear it, be at the same time capable of committing so many atrocities on the rest of humanity?”49

  The orchestra continued to comply with demands for specific repertoire, including medleys of tunes from popular German operettas, a medley of Schubert songs, and a medley of Russian Gypsy music titled after the famous tune “Dark Eyes.” In creating the latter, Szymon was assisted by Leon Weintraub, a Russian Jew from France and a brilliant violinist who specialized in both Russian folk music and Gypsy romances. The collaboration was a big hit. It was said that whenever the orchestra played the “Dark Eyes” medley, Schwarzhuber would stop whatever he was doing and walk over to his office window to lose himself in the music.

  Some of the pieces that the Germans requested ended up being poor choices from a political standpoint. One music-loving officer brought the orchestra two military marches to which he was sentimentally attached. The first, “Argonne Forest,” commemorated the Battle of the Argonne Forest, in which the officer had fought in World War I. The second, “Greetings to Upper Salzburg,” referred to the region in which the officer had grown up. Szymon worked late into the night to finish the orchestrations for the next day, but the orchestra never played either arrangement in its entirety. Schwarzhuber, who apparently paid great attention to the orchestra’s daily repertoire, had “Argonne Forest” stopped halfway through because he objected to celebrating a battle that was part of a lost war. The commander also interrupted the performance of “Greetings to Upper Salzburg” because he felt it was inappropriate for an ensemble of mostly Jewish prisoners to salute the region that was home to one of Hitler’s most famous residences.

  Despite its status as a forbidden genre, jazz music was popular among the SS officers and guards in the Birkenau Men’s Camp, just as it was in the Auschwitz Main Camp. SS section leader Pery Broad regularly visited the music barracks to jam with a jazz combo that included virtuoso trumpeter Louis Bannet. A world-class accordionist, Broad knew many jazz standards by heart and could hold his own with the orchestra’s most skilled improvisers. Broad would even smuggle into the camp the sheet music to popular tunes written by Jewish-American songwriters like Irving Berlin.

  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.”50

  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!”51

  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.”52

  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!”53

  Birkenau Women’s Camp Orchestra

  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 clari
net, 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.