To leave you with a bit of lagniappe for Women’s History Month, we broke our usual format to sit down for a talk with Anne Sebba, author of the new book, The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival. Anne tells us about some of the women in the orchestra, her process of learning about these women, organizing their stories into this book, and about other biographies she’s written in the past, about the past.
If you live in the UK or Australia, you’re in luck, this book is available now. The rest of us have to either wait or become resourceful to get our hands on a copy. But that doesn’t make the conversation Susan and Anne had about the remarkable survivors of the only all women’s orchestra in any Nazi prison camp any less interesting. Anne tells us the history of the orchestra, introduces us to Alma Rosé, an imprisoned celebrity violinist who became the orchestra’s main conductor, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, then a teenage cellist and, most recently, the last surviving member or the orchestra, and the extraordinary Hilde Grünbaum Zimche who recently passed away in 2024 at 100.
Anne, the author of numerous biographies, also tells us about her process for writing the books that we, non-fiction readers, gobble up (hint: it’s a lot longer than it takes us to read them.) To read more about Anne’s work, visit this, her website.
Other things we discussed:
The Shoah Foundation, formed after Schindeler’s List movie, whose mission is to “collect, preserve, and share survivor testimonies in order to increase knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust and to build a future for all that rejects antisemitism, hatred, dehumanization, and genocide.”
This book and movie it’s based on:
End music: Way, Way Back by Lvly with Megan Gifford, used with permission from Epidemic Sound
