Music of Another World is an important documentary record, frequently cited, of the Music of Another World is an important documentary record, frequently cited, of the ways in which music was used and musicians compelled to provide accompaniment to mass murder in Auschwitz.
Szymon Laks was a Polish composer and violinist who had a successful career in Paris in the years between 1925 and 1942 when he was detained as a Jew and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He survived as kapellmeister of the Auschwitz II Mens Orchestra and, at the end of the war, resumed his career as a composer in Paris where he died in 1983. This is the extraordinary story of the years in the concentration camp where he survived, with some other members of his orchestra, because they made music for the German SS who governed the camp and the constantly changing ranks of privileged prisoners - the haftlinge - who did most of the administrative and disciplinary work necessary for the maintenance of the camp and its industries. Laks concludes with an Appendix of three Polonaises, recreations of works that he composed during his years in Auschwitz.
Two questions are pervasive through his narrative. The first – How is it possible to find words for ‘things that cannot be described’, this ‘grotesque clash of music’ with the atrocities of Auschwitz-Birkenau? As conductor of the orchestra Laks felt compelled to relate this strange history of ‘music in a Nazi concentration camp’. The problem of finding words to frame the ‘ghastly authenticity’ of his account is apparent from the publication history of his book. A version was initially published in French with Rene Coudy, another survivor, in 1948. It quickly disappeared from view. In the 1950s Laks asked permission from the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art to publish a revised version in his native language. The Ministry ruled that his book was unfit for publication and refused permission because it presented too favourable an impression of the Germans and too distressing an impression of their prisoners as ‘devoid of all feelings of morality and human dignity’. Over the ensuing decades renewed attempts to obtain permission from the Ministry failed until the Polish version finally appeared in 1979. (The English translation by Chester A Kiesel which I have reviewed was published in America in 1989 by Northwestern University Press.) Laks’ second question is equally difficult – Why did the Germans maintain an orchestra of prisoners in a concentration camp? His first response, which is intentionally superficial, immediately enters the territory of the grotesque mentioned earlier:
'The first ambition of the Lagerfuhrer [commander] of every camp worthy of the name was to form his own Lager-kapelle [camp musical group], whose main role was to ensue he flawless functioning of camp discipline and on occasion to afford our guardian angels a bit of entertainment and relaxation, so necessary in carrying out their not always appreciated work’.
Auschwitz-Birkenau had no less than three orchestras during 1942-5, when Laks was imprisoned there. Initially recruited as a violinist he became kapellmeister of an orchestra of about 40 musicians in the men’s camp. Alma Rose, famous as a violinist before she was imprisoned, directed an orchestra in the women’s camp. Laks also describes a smaller orchestra in a section of Auschwitz where Czech Jews from Theresienstadt were imprisoned for a time. When the population of the ‘Czech camp’ was liquidated in the gas chambers, their instruments reverted to the main orchestra. Laks relates that his orchestra acquired new music stands and, among other instruments, a ‘priceless violincello, whose lack I had painfully felt’, which allowed him to form a string quartet to play classics and his own works, composed in Auschwitz.
The disorienting quality of Laks’ narrative should be apparent from these initial impressions. That reference to the ‘guardian angels’ of the camp, presumably an intentional irony, may have been less jarring in the original Polish. But the pleasure Laks derived from acquisition of the cello and other instruments sits strangely with his account of the mass murder that allowed their acquisition. Suddenly one is confronted with the first of Laks’ two questions: How can he describe his life as kapellmeister of the Auschwitz orchestra? And: What purpose did the orchestra serve? They require a consideration of his description of the structure of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The concentration camp was an industrial complex administered by military officers of the SS [Schutzstaffel, or Protection Squads] who were reliant for the operation of the complex on the slave labour of prisoners. Putting aside the internal administration of the camp, which employed many prisoners in positions of authority, Auschwitz had three industrial functions. The first was the mass murder by gas or shooting of the thousands of men, women and children deported from their homes who arrived daily in the overloaded trains that brought them to the camp. Four gangs of prisoners, Sonderkommando as they were known, most of them Jewish, were compelled to conduct the new arrivals to the gas chambers and dispose of their dead bodies in the crematoria. The second of the industrial functions was sorting, cataloguing and disposing of property confiscated from prisoners on their arrival at the station platform: valuables, jewellery, clothing, money, cigarettes, perfume, alcohol, food and medical supplies. Valuables were meant to be exported to Berlin to support the German wartime economy. Perishables were consumed within the camp. As the arrivals increased the prisoners responsible for this work the Aufraumungskommando, known colloquially as ‘Canadians’ – Canada was supposed to be a land of unlimited wealth - rose to more than 800 women and men. Opportunities for theft, bribery and trade in collusion with their SS commanders made the position of the Canadians in the prisoner hierarchy particularly enviable though always fragile and imperilled. The third industrial function was the provision of a slave labour force working outside the perimeter of the camp.
In the daily business of Auschwitz the orchestra was a marching band which accompanied the labour squads as they marched out of the camp to work in factories, construction and farming beyond the camp and welcomed them on their return to the camp at the end of the day. The marches were meant to be ‘gay, lively, joyous [and] varied’ to encourage work in the spirit of the slogan over the main gate: ‘Arbeit macht frei’. Most of the prisoners who marched to the strains of the orchestra would die within weeks from starvation, exhaustion, disease or beating by SS or Kapos, prisoners co-opted as overseers and guards.
The orchestra had a more conventional role in the camp structure as a source of entertainment and recreation for the SS and those prisoners, Laks calls them ‘VIP’s’, who had managed to secure positions of privilege in the administration of the camp or as specially skilled workers. Laks himself had a prisoner of lesser privilege as servant to cook for him and care for his tailored striped suit with its emblematic Kapellmeister’s lyre and pink and yellow triangles, making up the Star of David. The orchestra itself occupied a studio in Barracks 5 with carpenters and other craftsmen in a workspace of relative comfort. Among those who were not selected for immediate death by gas or imminent death from forced labour, Auschwitz presented the appearance of a small town, with shops, cinema, a sports club and theatre. The orchestra and its musicians were in constant demand for celebrations and concerts for the SS and privileged prisoners. Laks recounts a tripartite negotiation with the Commandant and another privileged prisoner responsible for the deployment of the slave labour squads who had complained of the inordinate manpower demands of the orchestra with its rehearsals and performances. He feared for his musicians who might be sent to die in the labour squads but the Commandant sided with Laks and permitted rehearsals.
The orchestra provided a veneer of civilisation for a totalitarian organisation whose primary purpose was mass murder. To the extent that it maintained the morale of the SS and kapos it enabled atrocities. The jolly marching songs that that sent the slave labour squads to their work, like the slogan Arbeit Macht Frei over the Auschwitz gate, mocked their misery. Laks’ discussion of the role of the orchestra begins with a quote from Victor Frankl, another survivor, who said that ‘Music as well as all other artistic endeavours were too grotesque in the concentration camp; they gave the impression of art only through the ghastly contrast with the background, which consisted of desperate existence.’ For prisoners who survived the immediate peril of the gas chambers, the orchestral performances could only ‘deepen still further their chronic state of mental and physical prostration’. Laks describes a Christmas performance he was directed to give in the hospital in the women’s prison, a place of sickening filth and imminent death. As the concert began the women began to weep and before long they abused the musicians and demanded an end to their torment compelling Laks and his orchestra to end their concert.
Laks was careful to retain the ‘ghastly authenticity’ of the original factual account of the role of the orchestra: the ‘grotesque clash of music with these facts brings this authenticity into even greater relief’. That insistence on the authenticity of his account of survival in in a world of compelled complicity extends to matters of tone and detail. In his account of a concert the orchestra was compelled to give for the Sonderkommando in 1945 Laks refers with literal and repellent accuracy to the bodies of the dead as ‘crematoria meat’, the ‘human fuel’, that sustained their own immolation. All 400 of the Sonderkommando were shot soon after this concert, when German defeat was imminent and the ovens and crematoria were shut down and partially destroyed.
Music in Another World is an account of dehumanisation, habituation and the necessity of participation in evil in order to survive. ‘White became black and black white….the basest human instincts…changed into genuine camp virtues, becoming one of the necessary – but not sufficient conditions for survival. As a prisoner in Auschwitz Laks was an inhabitant that ‘grey zone’ between innocence and criminality described by Primo Levi (The Drowned and the Saved) where moral condemnation sometimes must be suspended. But those who managed to survive are inevitably afflicted by consciousness of their participation in atrocity. Long after the war was over Laks was asked with accusative emphasis why it was that he survived when so many died? He ‘flushed, felt guilty and blurted out, though not without some affectation, "I’m very sorry…I didn’t do it on purpose"’. That strange reference to' affectation' seems to mask a continuing sense of shame for being a survivor ( )