About 30 U-M students and community members gathered at Britton Recital Hall Tuesday night to hear ‘Music from Auschwitz,’ a performance of 10 musical pieces composed by Polish political prisoners from the Auschwitz I men’s orchestra. None of the pieces have been performed for an audience since they were played in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp between 1940 and 1945.
Each of the original pieces and arrangements were prefaced by quotes from their composers. Rising Music, Theatre & Dance senior Jack Morin, a vocalist, recited a testimony by Ralph Maria Siegel, a Jewish composer and Auschwitz survivor. The testimony mentioned how prisoners of Auschwitz would perform for the SS, or Schutzstaffel, which were Nazi guards later charged for leading the “Final Solution”, or the mass murder of European Jewish people.
“‘After our concert for the SS we had a 30-minute break,’” Morin recited. “‘Then we would play for the prisoners in the yard by the camp kitchen. They certainly would have preferred something to eat but almost half of them came to listen, thousands of them.’”
Patricia Hall, professor of music theory at the Music, Theatre & Dance School, first began to bring the work of these composers to life in 2016. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, she said her interest in the manuscripts began when she read about musical scores commissioned by the SS and written by Jewish composers that contained unique instructions on how to play in the likely event that members of the ensemble were murdered.
“I read a book by Simon Laks, who was one of the conductors in Auschwitz,” Hall said. “He talked about this special notation he was forced to use because so many of his ensemble members were suddenly sick or they were dead, and so I became curious if there might be manuscripts in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.”
From there, Hall said she traveled to Poland and delved into the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, looking to discover more about these orchestrations.
“I got an appointment, and I went there not expecting to find anything,” Hall said. “Instead, I found literally hundreds of pages of manuscripts that no one had ever studied before, and I was immediately drawn to this one piece, ‘The Most Beautiful Time of Life,’ because I just could not imagine a title like that in Auschwitz. Even though I knew nothing about the music, I decided I just had to realize that piece.”
Pam Oatis, a community member, sat in the audience with her husband, John Kiely. In an interview with The Daily, Oatis said she was moved by the juxtaposition between the harrowing postwar testimonies of the composers and the cheerful nature of the music they had written at that time.
“I’ll quite honestly say I cried through most of it,” Oatis said. “Just the horror of what humans could do to one another, yet (at the same time) have parties, and how the prisoners would rather have gotten food but thousands came to hear the music. (It shows) there’s something about the therapy of music. I mean, what does music do for us? It lifts us out of horror to joy.”
Hall told The Daily the original goal behind retrieving the manuscripts was to produce recordings for the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
“My idea was that we could make a recording for the archive,” Hall said. “So they could actually hear what this ensemble sounded like because there are lots of thoughts about these ensembles … but no one really knows what they sounded like (because) there’s no recordings.”
In an interview with The Daily, Music, Theatre & Dance graduate Margot Cunningham, a viola player in the ‘Music from Auschwitz’ orchestra, said the project eventually expanded to a tour of concerts in 2020 but was halted due to the pandemic.
“We were actually supposed to do the project back in 2020,” Cunningham said. “We had a US tour and a Europe tour, but because of COVID, the Europe tour got canceled … Then, Professor Hall reached out to us three years later and asked us if we wanted to do the European tour.”
This performance is considered a “launch” concert for the European tour taking place this summer. About 20 Music, Theatre & Dance students and faculty will travel to Vienna, Austria and Kraków to debut music orchestrated by Jewish artists who were local to these cities before being sent to Auschwitz.
Hall said she hoped holding these concerts in the cities the composers were from would greatly impact the members of those communities today.
“The audience we’re going to perform for is at the Jewish Museum in Vienna, and the Jewish population of Austria was decimated during World War II, (and likewise) when we go to Kraków there will be a similar audience there,” Hall said. “So I think this is going to be very special for them to hear this music.”
Cunningham said the Music, Theatre & Dance School plans to visit Auschwitz while they tour across Europe, which she hopes will help the musicians connect with the music on a deeper, more emotional level.
“We’re going to be touring Auschwitz, and seeing where the orchestra played,” Cunningham said. “It’s just gonna be so powerful … I don’t know what it’s gonna feel like, but I’m very grateful to be part of it.”
Daily Staff Reporter Anna Javier can be reached at ajavier@umich.edu.