U.S. group re-creates Nazi death camp orchestra

NEW YORK — When Gustav Mahler's niece greeted new arrivals at a Nazi death camp, she knew that any woman who stepped off the train with a musical instrument had a chance to live.

Women in Alma Rose's orchestra were forced to entertain SS officers at the Birkenau concentration camp.

All the women survived — except Rose.

Now, an American chorus and orchestra is paying tribute to those musicians with concerts in the U.S. and Germany titled "Music in Desperate Times: Remembering The Women's Orchestra of Birkenau."

On Saturday, Ars Choralis played at Manhattan's Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, whose Episcopal bishop had spoken against the persecution of Jews in Europe already in 1933.

During the 18 months the Birkenau orchestra existed, its musicians played pieces the German officers loved — Beethoven symphonies, Puccini arias, Chopin and Strauss waltzes. The women also had to play marches for emaciated, often sick prisoners as they struggled to walk to their forced labor jobs.

All around was death — people perishing outdoors, or in filthy barracks and gas chambers. More than 1 million disappeared in this place of horror.

When the Vienna-born Rose (pronounced roh-ZAY') was sent to the camp, the SS guards realized she was Mahler's relative and had conducted an all-women's orchestra. She was asked to form one at Birkenau, for the pleasure of the Nazis.

"As the women came off transport trains, if they had a guitar, a violin, a recorder or a mandolin, they were put aside," said Alice Radosh, who helped organize the Ars Choralis concerts. "People would hear classical music — and think, 'How bad could this be?' "

The truth was, "we played with tears in our eyes and guns at our backs," Radosh quoted accordion player Esther Bejarano as saying after the war.

They were still expected to play well — or face possible death.

"At Birkenau, music was indeed the best and worst of things," wrote the late Fania Fenelon, a cabaret singer from Paris who wrote the book "Playing for Time," which was turned into a television movie starring Vanessa Redgrave.

"The best because it filled in time and brought us oblivion, like a drug; we emerged from it deadened, exhausted," Fenelon said, "and the worst because our public consisted of the assassins and the victims, and in the hand of the assassins, it was almost as though we too were made executioners."