In 1943, the German SS officers in charge of Auschwitz-Birkenau ordered that an orchestra should be formed among the female prisoners. Forty-seven women and girls were drafted into a hurriedly-assembled band that would play to other inmates as they left each morning and as they returned at the end of the day. They were made to give weekly concerts for Nazi officers, and members were sometimes summoned to give individual performances of an officer’s favourite piece of music. For almost all of the musicians chosen to take part, the orchestra was to save their lives.

Why was the orchestra formed? 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 the orchestra’s formidable conductor (and niece of Gustav Mahler) Alma Rosé, to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, its cellist and last surviving member, i draw on a mixture of archival research and exclusive first-hand accounts to bring the full and astonishing story of the orchestra and its members to light for the very first time.