Chances are you have watched a Holocaust movie. “Schindler’s List,” “The Pianist,” “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” “Escape from Sobibor,” or “The Book Thief” come to mind as some of the most memorable.
The setting of Auschwitz, one of the Nazis’ most notorious concentration camps, appears in many of these films. The horrific scenes of trainloads of Jewish families disembarking include classical music greeting them over a loudspeaker. The beautiful sounds contrast sharply with the inhumanity of what viewers know is about to take place.
According to Classic FM at www.classicfm. com,“Auschwitz-Birkenauwashome to at least six orchestras, comprised of prisoners commissioned by the SS. They were made to perform at official visits to the camp and to accompany marches to forced labour.”
One survivor recalled that trauma was a part of the orchestra’s performance.
“Prisoners were marched past the orchestra on their way back from forced labour, and how people who had been shot or beaten to death were propped up on chairs and displayed in front of the musicians beforehand.” (The Guardian, January 20, 2025) January 27, 1945, Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated. The Nazis were intent on destroying evidence of their atrocities before the Allies arrived, but a few years ago music composed by Jewish musicians at the camp was discovered amidst the ruins.
The haunting gift of this music was recovered accidentally. While on a visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum at the site of the concentration camp in Poland, British composer and director Leo Geyer had a chance conversation with a museum archivist. The historian told Geyer about music manuscripts that now lay buried beneath a backlog of archived material from the camp’s existence from 1940 to 1945.
“Over the last eight extraordinary years, Geyer has dedicated his life to deciphering the notes on those damaged scraps of scores so he can restore the music and recreate the works created and played within the camp,” the Guardian reported.
This week, eighty years to the day that skeletal Jewish prisoners walked free from the gates of Auschwitz after the Soviet Red Army liberated them, the music created “in hell” is the focus of a new documentary, “The Lost Music of Auschwitz.”
Not only does the film include the once lost scores composed in camp, but it also features moving interviews of some Auschwitz survivors. According to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, just 220,000 Holocaust survivors are still alive. In the next few years, the last survivors will be no more.
Thankfully, the music will live on, serving as a reminder that evil did not drown out the sound of hope and resistance eighty years ago.
