Leo Geyer had no ambition to become an expert on Holocaust music. But in 2015, after the conductor was commissioned to compose a tribute to Holocaust historian Sir Martin Gilberts, he visited Auschwitz to research the subject and found something that changed his plans.
“I had a conversation with one of the archivists who mentioned that, in a somewhat offhand way, there were some manuscripts in the depths of the archive. I nearly fell over when he told me,” Geyer tells me.
In 1945, as world war two reached its climax, Nazi guards attempted to hide and destroy any evidence of their crimes at the concentration camps and so Geyer believed most of the artefacts to have been lost to history. “I assumed that to be the case with the music and, indeed, the instruments,” he adds.
A month after the archivist’s revelation, Geyer returned and a decade later, the result is Sky’s new documentary, The Lost Music of Auschwitz. Directed by Tom Cook, and marking the 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation, the film follows Geyer on a quest to unearth how musicians imprisoned there rebelled with secret performances and hid forbidden melodies in their concerts.
Spliced with testimonies from survivors, performances from Geyer’s orchestra and anecdotes from his company, it’s a thought-provoking hybrid of documentary filmmaking and creative detective work with a real sense of urgency. But the project was nearly one Geyer stepped away from.
When Geyer began hunting through the manuscripts in the archives, their condition quickly made it clear why they had been overlooked for so long. “Most of them, well, all the manuscripts, were incomplete. Many of them had singed edges, were ripped and some of their pencil marks were faded. It’s the equivalent of several hundred jigsaw puzzles, all jumbled up together with many, many pieces missing,” Geyer explains. In fact, he admits, he would have happily let someone else take on the task.
“The other thing, I suppose, is that I’m not Jewish, Polish or descended from any other group or person who perished in Auschwitz and so one of the questions going through my mind was: who am I to do this work?” Then Geyer saw the unfinished manuscript for the Daremne żale (Futile Regrets), a Polish piece of music composed by Mieczysław Krzyński, deputy conductor of the Auschwitz I orchestra. His handwriting and signature were, virtually, a replica of Geyer’s and suddenly, the conductor felt a duty to finish it.
“You could see rubbings-out and kind of incomplete lines. It was very clear that the baton was being passed on,” Geyer says. Last year, as well as featuring in the film, Geyer performed the completed piece in London. The first half is a restoration of Krzyński’s original score and the second, is the conductor’s response. “I can only hope he would’ve been pleased with what I did,” he smiles.
In December 1940, Auschwitz’s first orchestra was created by order of SS soldiers and, slowly this evolved into a symphony orchestra with up to 80 players and a brass band with about 120 musicians. The bands had several purposes, all of them exploitative.
Every morning and evening, in an obscene act of cruelty, the orchestras were used to keep prisoners in time as they were marched to and from their labour assignments. For many inmates, the music was only heard on a subconscious level due to sheer exhaustion. As Primo Levi, the Jewish-Italian chemist, writer and Holocaust survivor recounted: “When this music plays, we know that our comrades, out in the fog, are marching like automatons; their souls are dead and the music drives them.”
Then, there was the truly gruesome. Trumpeter Herman Sachnowitz described how during his time at Monowitz, one of Auschwitz’s sub-camps, he had to play during executions, which usually occurred on Sunday mornings. He recounts: “Perhaps they intended to drown out the last protests and final curses with music. A grotesque spectacle that had been ordered at the highest level.” As he played, SS guards had their rifles pointed at him.
Birkenau, the women’s camp, only had one orchestra but members were subjected to the same level of profanity. Musicians were forced to play a ‘welcome greeting’ alongside the railway platform during selection in order to deceive the new arrivals as they awaited their fate. At other times, they were ordered to play for private performances, at ceremonial obligations (such as for Rudolf Höss, camp commandant SS-Obersturmführer) or purely for guards to relax. Today, the women’s orchestra is perhaps more well-known than the men’s due to Fania Fenelon’s memoirs and Vanessa Redgrave’s award-winning portrayal of her in Arthur Miller’s Playing for Time (1980), which portrayed how membership of the orchestra spared inmates from physical labour, but at the cost of their dignity.
Being part of the orchestra, as Dr Teresa Wontor-Cichy explains in The Lost Music of Auschwitz, was not an “easy story”. Players were forced to earn their place in the ensemble, playing in front of the prisoner selected to be the orchestra’s conductor and perhaps no ‘audition’ was as harrowing as that of Jakub Segar, a Romani violinist known to other orchestra members as the man with perfect pitch.
“I was there when his transport arrived into the camp,” Pawel Stolecki recalls in his written testimony of his time at Auschwitz. He goes on to write that after Segar was stripped naked and his belongings were taken, he cried and begged the guards to leave him his violin as he did not want to part with it under any circumstances. There, naked, Segar picked up his instrument and, as if in a trance, played for his life. “It secured his immediate inclusion in the orchestra,” Stolecki wrote.
“Segar could hear a melody once and play it back,” Geyer says, introducing the piece he composed in the violinist’s memory. It is to be played by Antal Zalai, a Romani classical violinist in Geyer’s company who feels the weight of Segar’s actions. In Romani culture, music and dance are everything and at that point, he explains, “taking his violin would’ve meant taking his life.” Zalai then plays Geyer’s piece, remarkably, with a violin that survived the destruction at the camp, even if its owner did not.
Playing For Time was, of course, just one of many attempts to bring the horrors of the Holocaust to modern screens. Most recently, Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Intertest laid bare the mechanisms of how the genocide came to be and Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain presents a comedic take on the generational trauma of the Holocaust. And this new documentary poses new questions to contemporary watchers about the reality of Auschwitz: What did their suffering sound like? And, if we knew, should we hear it again?
These were the very questions that Geyer and his company needed to answer when creating The Lost Music of Auschwitz. As the film’s narration notes, it’s hard to envision a more macabre location for music. Yet, one of the problems facing the production team was that the music found in the camp’s archives was anything but morbid, with SS officers frequently requesting German Foxtrots to be, repeatedly, played for their own entertainment.
“There was this challenging juxtaposition of making music when almost all of it was jovial and upbeat,” Geyer says. Nonetheless, reimagining the stark contrast of the prisoners’ and guards’ conflicting realities felt important to him and, in fact, it creates the film’s most striking scenes. When the music plays, it’s accompanied by a montage of photographs where soldiers are drinking champagne, clinking beers and relaxing on one of the porches in Solahütte, the resort for Nazi officers just 18 miles from the camp.
Then there was the music that had no place in their film. Geyer explains that something quite common across all concentration camps was that anthems were forced to be sung by all of the prisoners. The one for Auschwitz was called Börgermoorlied.
“It’s in D major which is often considered to be the brightest and the happiest of all keys. For example, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy is in D major,” he adds. The anthem’s lyrics also contained the lie that sat on top of the infamous arched entry to Auschwitz, arbeit macht frei. Geyer and the production team walked a “delicate tightrope” but a firm consensus was formed that this deserved to be lost to history. “We certainly didn’t want to be fueling any far right movement that would have delighted about the restoration of this kind of music,” he adds.
Every piece Geyer and his company include in the documentary aims to illuminate the victims’ experiences before offering hope and defiance. As Geyer explains this, I am reminded of a comment by Ivor Perl, who survived Auschwitz as a 12-year-old, during the film’s final moments. When asked what the world can learn from what he and others endured, he pleads with audiences to learn the lessons of history and be vigilant of the threat of fascism. “Humanity must learn, or it will happen again,” he says. Today, evil may just be “wearing a different overcoat.”
The Lost Music of Auschwitz is available on Sky now
