Interviewer: Hadley Freeman
Hadley Freeman is a former Guardian columnist and features writer. She now writes columns about feminism, the arts, politics and anything else that takes her fancy for The Sunday Times. She also interviews celebrities, authors and anyone with an interesting story.
She is, in her own words, ‘a multi-award-loser and the author of various books,’ most recently her study of anorexia, Good Girls.
The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz
Publication date 27 March 2025
Published to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps, one of the UK’s most distinguished biographers tells the extraordinary story of the fifty women captives at Auschwitz-Birkenau who were assembled to play marching music for the other inmates and forced labourers as they left each morning, as well as for weekly concerts given to their Nazi captors.
From Alma Rosé, the orchestra's main conductor, niece of Gustav Mahler and a formidable pre-war celebrity violinist, to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, its teenage cellist and last surviving member, Sebba has drawn on meticulous archival research and exclusive first-hand accounts to tell the full and astonishing story of the orchestra, its members and the response of other prisoners for the very first time.
