LONDON (RNS) — When the Roma violinist Jakub Segar arrived at Auschwitz, the concentration camp’s guards ordered him to strip and hand over all his belongings, including his violin. Unable to bear being parted from his precious instrument, he played it for the guards in the hope that he would be allowed to keep it. It was the performance of his life: so impressed were the guards that they gave him a reprieve. Not only was he spared the gas chamber, but he joined one of the many orchestras in the camp.
Segar’s harrowing story, and that of the other orchestras in Birkenau-Auschwitz, whose liberation took place 80 years ago today, is the subject of research by British musician and Oxford University doctoral candidate Leo Geyer, who for the past eight years has been studying the music made at Auschwitz. Though the story of the orchestras in the camps was known in part, Geyer’s work has led to the discovery of manuscripts of music composed at the camp, as well as scores by well-known composers, comprising 210 fragments in all.
He has painstakingly put them back together with the help of historians, musicologists and Holocaust survivors to produce a haunting collection of Auschwitz music. “I had not known about these manuscripts and neither had the world known,” he said. “It was overwhelming but also very difficult to work there, knowing what had happened to so many people in Auschwitz.”
About 1.1 million people died in Auschwitz, and while the majority were Jews, others were Roma, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities. The Nazi security force, the S.S., commissioned at least six orchestras, including one made up of women prisoners. They played marching tunes but also performed at social events outside the camp, such as birthday parties for the officers.
Geyer came upon the forgotten manuscripts by chance in 2015 when he first visited Auschwitz while working on a commissioned commemorative piece of music to honor the late Sir Martin Gilbert, the author of a history of the Holocaust. At the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, an archivist mentioned some fragments of musical scores that had been left forgotten in the archives. Since then Geyer has visited many times to put them together.
Leo Geyer. (Photo © Sky UK)
“Before I went to Auschwitz,” said Geyer, “I knew that the principal focus was marching music. But I discovered that the story of the orchestras was far more complex.” An integral part of the life of camp, it was played “for executions, for openings of parts of the camp, for parties, too.”
Constella Music, an orchestra Geyer leads, has performed some of the compositions, as well as a piece composed by Geyer inspired by the story of Jakub Segar.
Among the music he has managed to recreate from the fragments is a piece called “Daremne Zale,” or “Futile Regrets.” Matching the handwriting on the composition to music in the Polish archive revealed it to be by Mieczysław Krzyński, the deputy conductor of the Auschwitz I orchestra. In a recent documentary film by the British TV channel Sky Arts, “The Lost Music of Auschwitz,” Geyer describes it as “racked with grief and sorrow and clearly written to express the world which surrounded him.”
Although no music survived from the women’s orchestra, testimonies from camp survivors enabled Geyer to recreate an arrangement of a Chopin piece by Alma Rose, the niece of Gustav Mahler and a highly regarded musician in her time, who also wrote words set to the music.
Other prominent musical figures imprisoned at Auschwitz included Adam Kopycinski, who conducted one of the men’s orchestras and went on to found the Wroclaw Philharmonic after the war. The camp orchestra he took over consisted of only Polish, Czech and Russian gentiles, but after the non-Jewish prisoners were deported to Germany, Kopycinski was allowed to enlist Jews. He later talked of the moral dilemma of rejecting a musician after an audition, because rejection was likely to lead to execution.
Although the orchestras included violinists such as Segar, who survived the camp and had a post-war professional career, they lacked the large numbers of string players typical of a conventional orchestra. Instead they employed whatever musicians and instruments were available among the prisoners, including multiple accordionists and mandolin and recorder players. The S.S., always wanting more marching music, requisitioned brass instruments from towns neighboring the camp. Records show a piano was retrieved from a nearby river and, though repaired, was still badly damaged.
Evidence about the instruments was found in the archives, Geyer explained, including drawings of the musicians. Some drawings were inserted into a glass bottle and buried, to be dug up when the camp was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945.
Leo Geyer and the Constella Music. (Courtesy photo)
The musicians not only did the S.S.’ bidding, Geyer found, but added Polish tunes and other music as an act of resistance. “One daring act of rebellion was to include American marching music in their performances. It was wonderfully brazen to insert a piece by de Souza,” said Geyer, “and the officers didn’t notice.”
Trumpet and bugle calls were popular with the guards, but they did not spot the musicians were performing a Polish favorite, “St Mary’s Call,” bound to the history and traditions of Krakow. Kopycinski, distressed at being ordered to play at an execution, once played a Chopin etude that had been forbidden by the guards.
In June, the first performances of a new opera-ballet, “The Orchestras of Auschwitz,” will be performed at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London. The score includes some of Geyer’s discoveries, which will be performed by Constella Music and choreographed by Claudia Schreier, choreographer in residence of Atlanta Ballet.
“The public needs to know what happened,” said Geyer. “Music was used as part of the infrastructure of the camp, but for the musicians it was also a way of surviving.”
