United Kingdom The Final Musician of Auschwitz: Toby Trackman (director), Deborah Lee (producer), Proven on BBC 2 (and out there on BBC iPlayer for 11 months), 27.1.2025. (CSa)
On January twenty seventh, 1945, Soviet troopers of the sixtieth Military of the First Ukrainian Entrance opened the gates of Auschwitz Focus and Extermination Camp the place they discovered some 7,000 prisoners – males, girls and youngsters. In lower than 5 years of the camp’s existence over 1.1 million Jews drawn from each nook of occupied Europe had perished there, murdered within the fuel chambers or ovens, or by taking pictures, hanging, hunger or illness. Auschwitz was simply one among many Nazi killing centres contributing to the liquidation of over 6 million Jews.
Toby Trackman’s well timed and compelling documentary, The Final Musician of Auschwitz, lately screened on BBC 2, commemorates the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of this hellish place. Well timed as a result of because the survivor inhabitants dwindles, the historical past and classes of the Holocaust danger slipping into obscurity. Solely final week, the Convention on Jewish Materials Claims In opposition to Germany printed the outcomes of an eight-country survey carried out in 2024. Amongst its surprising findings had been that lots of these consulted knew nothing of the Holocaust; that enormous swathes of the inhabitants had been unaware that Jews had been killed; and {that a} notable proportion believed that the variety of these murdered had been tremendously exaggerated. Astonishingly, some 48% of Individuals consulted couldn’t identify a single Nazi loss of life camp, killing web site, or ghetto.
Trackman’s documentary investigates a wholly surprising and incongruous facet of camp life: music and musicians, and the position they performed. He does so by rigorously threading collectively archived movie, recorded interviews with former prisoners, and readings by actors, along with an erudite historic commentary by The Guardian journalist and writer Jonathan Freedland. Singers and instrumentalists, enjoying exterior the camp’s perimeters, tragically recreate lengthy misplaced songs and heartbreaking fragments of melody from the camp’s clandestine composers.
We uncover that there have been some fifteen orchestras within the Auschwitz-Birkenau Advanced whose inmate members had been drawn from some the best gamers in Europe and find out how music was used each as a software of oppression or type of non secular resistance. For in Auschwitz, tradition and barbarism co-existed. Music was intentionally exploited as a part of the Nazi terror. It turned a medium of torture whereby these bands had been compelled to play jaunty marches even whereas the furnaces of the crematoria roared or as slave labourers left for work and returned. Music was additionally used to deceive and reassure. Strains of Mozart greeted dazed captives as they had been unloaded from cattle vehicles on the camp gates. ‘It will probably’t be this dangerous if they’re enjoying Eine kleine Nachtmusik recounted one aged survivor.
Trackman’s principal witness – the eponymous Final Musician of Auschwitz – was the German-born cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, now 99-years-old. Spry, chain smoking, deep-voiced and nonetheless intellectually formidable, she put one in thoughts of the late Golda Meir. Wallfisch performed within the Auschwitz Ladies’s Orchestra underneath the route of fellow-prisoner Alma Rosé, whose father Arnold was the chief of the Vienna Philharmonic and whose uncle was Gustav Mahler. Wallfisch described how on arrival, after having been stripped bare, shaved and tattooed by one other prisoner, she casually talked about that she performed the cello. This led to a gathering with Alma Rosé, the availability of an instrument stolen from one other prisoner, and a life-saving job within the band.
Because the horrors of camp life raged, the guards demanded from their captives classical concert events of much-loved German music, an unfathomable confluence of tradition and cruelty which reminds one among George Steiner’s statement ‘{that a} man can learn Goethe or Rilke within the night, that he can play Bach or Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz within the morning’. Recounting a chilling go to one night by the sadistic Dr Mengele to Wallfisch’s barracks, she was ordered to carry out one among his favorite items – Träumerei (‘Goals’) from Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen (‘Scenes from Childhood’): ‘I performed it very quick and thought simply get out’.
Paradoxically, music at Auschwitz fulfilled an necessary and life-enhancing perform: it provided orchestra members a transient hope of survival. Secretly composed and illicitly performed works turned an expression of defiance and a short lived supply of dignity and emotional consolation. Trackman’s movie introduces us to Adam Kopyciński, a Polish composer and conductor of the primary of the lads’s orchestras. Earlier than he was liberated in 1945 he wrote Lullaby, a brightly optimistic piece which he devoted to a toddler, and which was movingly carried out at night time by the Italian pianist Francesco Lotoro within the grounds of the previous camp commandant’s neighbouring home, lately made well-known in Jonathan Glazer’s unforgettable movie Zone of Curiosity.
We’re additionally heard extracts from the work of Polish Jewish composer Syzmon Laks, a camp survivor who turned head of one other prisoner’s orchestra. A spectral however significantly lovely account of the second motion of his Third String Quartet – written and practiced in secret – was performed within the shadows of the camp.
Reminiscences of the Jewish poet and track author Ilsa Weber had been poignantly recreated. Weber wrote principally for youngsters and was voluntarily transported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz along with her younger son Tommy. Recognised by one of many camp’s Sonderkommando, she was suggested to take a seat on the ground of the fuel chamber and breathe deeply to make sure a speedier loss of life. She and Tommy died whereas singing her personal composition – the nursery rhyme Wiegale.
Trackman’s effectively researched and transferring movie 80 years on not solely breaks the center. It additionally fulfils a treasured obligation – the pressing must bear witness and protect reminiscence.
Chris Sallon
