Anne Sebba talks to Louisa Treger

Journalist and biographer Anne Sebba introduces some of the 50 women and girl prisoners drafted into an orchestra to play marching music to other inmates at Auschwitz as they left for work and returned each day and regular concerts for Nazi officers.

Sebba explains how the orchestra was the only entirely female one in all the Nazi prison camps and it was to save the lives of most of its members. Members included Alma Rosé, niece of Gustav Mahler, and teenage cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. What role could music play in a Nazi death camp? What was the effect on women who survived because they were part of a Nazi propaganda project? And how did they feel as they provided solace to the perpetrators of a genocide that claimed the lives of their family and friends?

Sebba has worked as a journalist for Reuters and the BBC. She is author of 11 books including That Woman, a life of Wallis Simpson, and a life of Ethel Rosenberg, who was electrocuted in 1953 for conspiracy to commit espionage following a trial with many miscarriages of justice. Here she talks to novelist Dr Louisa Treger, author of The Paris Muse and Madwoman.

Part of the festival’s programme of Jewish and Hebrew literature and culture.