MJH | “The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz” Book Talk

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 from eleven nations 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 also made to give weekly concerts for Nazi officers, and members were sometimes summoned to give individual performances of an officer’s favorite piece of music. For almost all of the musicians chosen to take part, the orchestra was to save their lives. But at what cost? Anne Sebba’s The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz tells this story.

Anne Sebba FRSL is the prize-winning author of eleven books including the best-selling biography That Woman, a life of Wallis Simpson based on her discovery of 15 unpublished letters locked away in an attic trunk. Her next book was Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940’s about a wide variety of women and how they behaved in wartime Paris published in the US, UK, China, France and the Czech Republic, winner of the Franco-British award. She has also written biographies of Jennie Churchill, Mother Teresa and Laura Ashley among others.

In 2024 Anne was a judge for the inaugural non-fiction Women’s Prize. She makes regular television appearances and has presented programmes for BBC R3 and R4 including two about the pianists, Harriet Cohen and Joyce Hatto. She began her working career as a foreign correspondent for Reuters news agency, the first woman accepted on their graduate trainee scheme, and has also worked for the BBC world services in their Arabic department, although she does not speak a word of Arabic. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, a Trustee of the National Archives Trust and a former chair of Britain’s 10,000 strong Society of Authors Management Committee.

In 2021 she published to great acclaim a life of Ethel Rosenberg, electrocuted in 1953 aged 37 for conspiracy to commit espionage following a trial with multiple miscarriages of justice, optioned for a feature film and shortlisted for the Wingate Prize. Her latest book is The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, a Story of Survival, published in the UK in March 2025, to commemorate the 80TH anniversary of the liberation of the camps and in the US in September 2025. The book will be translated into Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Finnish, Romanian and Chinese. Anne also works as a reviewer, journalist, after dinner speaker and lecturer on cruises, is an accredited speaker for the Arts Society as well as various other institutions and schools in the UK and US including the British Library, Royal Oak, English Speaking Union and the National Trust.

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