This book was recommended to me by my mother. She was in a book club for my entire childhood and doesn’t flinch from reading challenging books. Like all books written about the Holocaust this one is a big challenge.
Fania Fénelon joined the French Resistance in 1940 until she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and joined the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz when it was formed in 1943. While she was not the founder, she seems to have taken over as much as she needed, ensuring the women were kept in the orchestra and not sent back out to the camp where they could die at any moment. Yes, she knew that she was keeping people alive and that was a good thing, but there is more to just being alive and Fénelon also kept people’s spirits up. She was not just keeping herself alive, she was creating community.
One of the tasks she found herself doing was orchestrating the music. She would be given one part of the music and would have to figure out how to change it to fit the musicians and instruments she had available. On one occasion she was given just the piano part of the Lustspiel and was asked to orchestrate it. She read the top part and everything fell into place in her mind. They were given unlined paper, a pencil and a ruler. They had to rule up the staff (the musical staff, five lines that guide where the notes are placed) themselves before they could start writing anything down. One of her first demands (couched as requests) were for copyists and more paper. More copyists means more people saved. But it also means they can make copies faster so that the Nazis would be happier with them.
These women were treated little better than the rest of the inhabitants of the camp. They were given little more food and then paraded around to outsiders. They were then able to say ‘look how well we treat these people’. It was one way of fooling visitors to the camp and make them think they were treating the inhabitants well. But it wasn’t enough, the ladies were still starving.
Through this book we’re told about the camp and how it works. Where they make decisions to keep the numbers low and shuffle some people off to extermination, often in one of their Zyklon B trucks. After a while inhabitants tend to know what’s going to happen to those going into these trucks, some go quietly, some go loudly, and some go with laughter and singing. The reason for the laughter and singing is so that the Nazis know these people haven’t been cowed.
Near the end of the book the musicians have been moved to Bergen-Belsen, the weather is dreadful with lots of rain, if you open your mouth the rain might go straight down into your lungs. Apparently women drowned in that rain because of the water in their lungs. Many of them were sick with typhus, and they were housed in big tents. Anne Frank was under the same canvas as Fénelon. You’ve probably heard of Anne Frank. I visited the house she’d been hiding in when we visited Amsterdam in 2018. And now here she is briefly mentioned in this book.
April 15th 1945 just illustrates the capriciousness of events. The women have been scheduled to be shot at 3pm, but the British soldiers arrive at 11am. Suddenly they are saved and the SS are the prisoners. Something the world learned from these former prisoners was how not to feed people who have been underfed for so long. Far too many of the former prisoners died because their bodies couldn’t handle the rich food that the liberating soldiers were giving them. We’ve learned to feed undernourished people slowly and with bland food first, give their bodies a chance to acclimate to proper food.
I loved the writing in this book. It was clear cut, so we saw the brutality, but there was an undercurrent of caring for others. There are so many people who didn’t survive, it’s lovely to read about some who did.