United Kingdom The Last Musician of Auschwitz: Toby Trackman (director), Deborah Lee (producer), Shown on BBC 2 (and available on BBC iPlayer for 11 months), 27.1.2025. (CSa)
On January 27th, 1945, Soviet soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front opened the gates of Auschwitz Concentration and Extermination Camp where they found some 7,000 prisoners – men, women and children. In less than five years of the camp’s existence over 1.1 million Jews drawn from every corner of occupied Europe had perished there, murdered in the gas chambers or ovens, or by shooting, hanging, starvation or disease. Auschwitz was just one of many Nazi killing centres contributing to the liquidation of over 6 million Jews.
Toby Trackman’s timely and compelling documentary, The Last Musician of Auschwitz, recently screened on BBC 2, commemorates the 80th anniversary of the liberation of this hellish place. Timely because as the survivor population dwindles, the history and lessons of the Holocaust risk slipping into obscurity. Only last week, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany published the results of an eight-country survey conducted in 2024. Amongst its shocking findings were that many of those consulted knew nothing of the Holocaust; that large swathes of the population were unaware that Jews had been killed; and that a notable proportion believed that the number of those murdered had been greatly exaggerated. Astonishingly, some 48% of Americans consulted could not name a single Nazi death camp, killing site, or ghetto.
Trackman’s documentary investigates an entirely unexpected and incongruous aspect of camp life: music and musicians, and the role they played. He does so by carefully threading together archived film, recorded interviews with former prisoners, and readings by actors, together with an erudite historical commentary by The Guardian journalist and author Jonathan Freedland. Singers and instrumentalists, playing outside the camp’s perimeters, tragically recreate long lost songs and heartbreaking fragments of melody from the camp’s clandestine composers.
We discover that there were some fifteen orchestras in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex whose inmate members were drawn from some of the finest players in Europe and learn how music was used both as a tool of oppression or form of spiritual resistance. For in Auschwitz, culture and barbarism co-existed. Music was deliberately exploited as part of the Nazi terror. It became a medium of torture whereby these bands were forced to play jaunty marches even while the furnaces of the crematoria roared or as slave labourers left for work and returned. Music was also used to deceive and reassure. Strains of Mozart greeted dazed captives as they were unloaded from cattle cars at the camp gates. ‘It can’t be this bad if they are playing Eine kleine Nachtmusik recounted one elderly survivor.
Trackman’s principal witness – the eponymous Last Musician of Auschwitz – was the German-born cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, now 99-years-old. Spry, chain smoking, deep-voiced and still intellectually formidable, she put one in mind of the late Golda Meir. Wallfisch played in the Auschwitz Women’s Orchestra under the direction of fellow-prisoner Alma Rosé, whose father Arnold was the leader of the Vienna Philharmonic and whose uncle was Gustav Mahler. Wallfisch described how on arrival, after having been stripped naked, shaved and tattooed by another prisoner, she casually mentioned that she played the cello. This led to a meeting with Alma Rosé, the provision of an instrument stolen from another prisoner, and a life-saving job in the band.
As the horrors of camp life raged, the guards demanded from their captives classical concerts of much-loved German music, an unfathomable confluence of culture and cruelty which reminds one of George Steiner’s observation ‘that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach or Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning’. Recounting a chilling visit one evening by the sadistic Dr Mengele to Wallfisch’s barracks, she was ordered to perform one of his favourite pieces – Träumerei (‘Dreams’) from Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen (‘Scenes from Childhood’): ‘I played it very fast and thought just get out’.
Paradoxically, music at Auschwitz fulfilled an important and life-enhancing function: it offered orchestra members a transient hope of survival. Secretly composed and illicitly played works became an expression of defiance and a temporary source of dignity and emotional comfort. Trackman’s film introduces us to Adam Kopyciński, a Polish composer and conductor of the first of the men’s orchestras. Before he was liberated in 1945 he wrote Lullaby, a brightly optimistic piece which he dedicated to a child, and which was movingly performed at night by the Italian pianist Francesco Lotoro in the grounds of the former camp commandant’s neighbouring house, recently made famous in Jonathan Glazer’s unforgettable film Zone of Interest.
We also heard extracts from the work of Polish Jewish composer Syzmon Laks, a camp survivor who became head of another prisoner’s orchestra. A spectral but particularly beautiful account of the second movement of his Third String Quartet – written and practiced in secret – was played in the shadows of the camp.
Memories of the Jewish poet and song writer Ilsa Weber were poignantly recreated. Weber wrote mostly for children and was voluntarily transported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz with her young son Tommy. Recognised by one of the camp’s Sonderkommando, she was advised to sit on the floor of the gas chamber and breathe deeply to ensure a speedier death. She and Tommy died while singing her own composition – the nursery rhyme Wiegale.
Trackman’s well researched and moving film 80 years on not only breaks the heart. It also fulfils a precious obligation – the urgent need to bear witness and preserve memory.
Chris Sallon