The music was magnificent – played by a 50-strong orchestra of women and young girls brought together specifically to play rousing music to inspire the workers, or private selections for the benefit of the officers in charge. A talented group indeed, these women were forced to play quite literally for their lives in the most deadly of circumstances: Auschwitz-Birkenau.

What place does music have in a death camp? How did the musicians find the strength to play the notes? How did it feel to be forced to provide solace to the perpetrators of a genocide? Award-winning historian Anne Sebba traces these tangled questions of deep moral complexity with sensitivity and care to tell for the first time the full story of The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz.

‘… a story of how darkness beyond the imagination could never extinguish the light of humanity at its brightest, bravest and best.’  

Anthony Seldon