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Eight years ago, Leo Geyer was at the museum that now stands at Auschwitz-Birkenau, when he got chatting to an archivist. It was a conversation that would change his life.
“It was actually an accident,” says the musician and composer. “He just said in an offhand way that there were music manuscripts buried in the depths of the archive.” Geyer knew about the orchestras of Auschwitz concentration camp, “as most classical musicians do”, he adds. But he had no idea there were any manuscripts left after the Nazis tried to liquidate the camp before the arrival of the Red Army. The majority of artefacts from Auschwitz were destroyed – and Geyer, like most before him, assumed this would include the music.
Yet this was not the case: quite a few scores had survived. None, however, were complete; many were damaged or faded. The archivist didn’t think Geyer would be interested in the fragments, due to their poor condition. Instead, this discovery sparked “years of music detective work”, he says – detective work that not only fuelled his doctorate research, but also the hour-long documentary The Lost Music of Auschwitz, timed to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. Over the last eight extraordinary years, Geyer has dedicated his life to deciphering the notes on those damaged scraps of scores so he can restore the music and recreate the works created and played within the camp.
The fact that music, particularly classical music, was performed and written in such circumstances may seem surprising to most. “Why would you think that an orchestra would exist in the hell on Earth that was Auschwitz?” Geyer asks. But, he says, the Nazis “weaponised” music, incorporating it into the death camp’s infrastructure: six orchestras were commissioned by guards, and consisted of prisoners who received slightly better food and lived separately from everyone else.
In turn, they were forced to play when the trains arrived. “The symphony orchestra was playing … I never heard playing so beautifully,” Holocaust survivor Yolan Frank, in a revisited 1997 interview, says. “Such beautiful music, you don’t think of something bad.”
Survivor Jirka Juhn also describes how prisoners were marched past the orchestra on their way back from forced labour, and how people who had been shot or beaten to death were propped up on chairs and displayed in front of the musicians beforehand. Leon Greenman recalls, in a 1995 recording: “We knew when we heard music that, OK, we were going to work again. What’s going to happen today? Will we ever get back?”
The orchestras also provided entertainment for the SS guards. Nino Casiroli’s Nie War Musik So Schön (Music Has Never Been So Beautiful) was one piece requested – a jarringly uplifting tune that Geyer says is the most emotionally challenging to play. “The SS men were sitting there: comfortable, drinking beers,” says Ora Markstein in a 1995 interview. “And I was standing there and I thought to myself, while the sun was shining: ‘Where am I? What is happening to us? Where is god?’”
But music was also performed in secret, used to transmit subversive messages and as a means for rebellion. In one segment focusing on Heinrich Krols’ Arbeitslager Marsch – the “labour camp march”, which was written in the camp and performed numerous times – Geyer explains how Krol added dissonances into the melodic lines and wrote prolonged passages in a minor key. This was a message of mourning and a revolt against the guards. Several examples of almost brazen rebellion serve as a reminder that even within the horror of the camp, there were glimmers of hope.
The works Geyer found in the archive revealed that the orchestras were often “unbalanced”, making use of “bizarre” instruments that were available at the camp but did not necessarily belong in a classical orchestra, such as accordion and recorder. Now, Geyer brings an orchestra together to play these works – though none of the performances could take place in the camp, as the museum prohibits re-enactments on Auschwitz’s grounds.
As they play, one of the most intriguing facts about the film is hidden from the audience: all the pieces of music are performed from memory.
“As classical musicians, we don’t usually do this,” says Geyer. “It forced us to learn the music on a totally different level.” Unsure about the idea at first, Geyer and the other musicians soon came around to it: “We were able to give it something else. We weren’t reading the music. It was like we owned it. It was in us.”
