Beauty in a broken place

Music was first used in Auschwitz to make inmates work faster. Now it forms the centre of a special memorial on the 60th anniversary of the death camp's liberation, writes Stuart Jeffries.

There is the most beautiful sunset beyond the avenue of trees alongside the red-brick blockhouses in Auschwitz. After a long, bleak drive through the Polish countryside, I savour the sight. We are gingerly walking along an icy path between the blockhouses, past the one where Dr Josef Mengele experimented on and murdered Jewish women. Suddenly, I become ashamed of what I'm feeling: surely there can be no space for such aesthetic appreciation in Auschwitz.

There are four of us: a BBC press officer, a film producer, another journalist and me. The others had noticed the grandeur of the sunset, too, and when I mention it, one of them laughs a gentle, embarrassed English laugh. We are walking to an infirmary block in Auschwitz to hear something beautiful: the great Russian violinist Maxim Vengerov performing the chaconne from Bach's D minor Partita No 2 for a scene in a BBC film called Holocaust: A Music Memorial From Auschwitz. It will be broadcast to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation on January 27th, 1945.

In his memoir, If This Is A Man, Primo Levi described hearing the musical reveille every morning from his infirmary bed. "We all feel that this music is infernal," he wrote. "The tunes are few, a dozen, the same ones every day, morning and evening: marches and popular songs dear to every German. They lie engraved on our minds and will be the last thing in the Lager that we shall forget; they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards. 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, like the wind drives dead leaves, and takes the place of their wills."

In this hopeless place the director James Kent has chosen to begin the 15-minute sequence that will be his film's climax. Vengerov will be filmed as he walks out of the infirmary, playing the chaconne. He will then be filmed walking through nearby Birkenau, down the railway track, past the site where Nazis selected newcomers for the gas chambers, and then out of the death camp, through the arch below the guard house that you may have seen in Schindler's List. All the while he will play the violin. "It is meant to be a redemptive walk," says Kent.

During each take, Ben Weston, the programme's producer, who has been following Vengerov's majestic playing in the score, waves his head in time, enraptured. I, too, am caught up in the chaconne's nobility and grace - and in wondering what place such words have here.

Little music has been played in Auschwitz in the past 60 years, apart from sung Kaddish prayers and the likes of solo violins played to assist other kinds of mourning. The museum hasn't encouraged concerts or film crews but, exceptionally, allowed the BBC in to make this memorial. "It's a very beautiful idea," says Mirek Obstarczyk, a curator at the museum. The previous day he was watching a soprano singing the second movement of Gorecki's third symphony before the cameras. "The snow was falling around her, and she sang, and she started crying. I was moved", he says, "like never before."

It was such an incredible honour to be asked to take part in this project, Vengerov says, that he readily broke off from a European tour to do so. (Earlier, Weston told me that another great Jewish violinist, Itzhak Perlman, felt unable to come to Auschwitz to perform in the film.) So why did Vengerov come? "We can send a powerful message not just about what happened but what will happen in the future." What do you understand the message to be? "The message of music is love. Music is at the top, near the highest spirit. This is our example. Humans go up and down."

Humans did certainly go down, perhaps never lower than the Nazis did at Auschwitz. But as they went down, surely they took music with them. It was used to facilitate their machine of slavery and death. Wasn't music irrevocably tainted by its role in the death camps? "Music can be misunderstood. I know that really barbaric things happened here. But there are two sides: we have a beautiful side and a dark side. Music educated me. It made me a better person."

That better person has come to commemorate the dead. "Playing music in the camps is to pray for the victims who suffered so much. I hope that they can hear us and know that we haven't forgotten them. We won't allow them to be forgotten." Why the chaconne? "The music of Bach is so pure, so clear. It covers such a range of emotions. It is like coming out of a dark tunnel into the light."

Vengerov also points out that the chaconne has 33 variations, symbolising the years of Christ's life. My worry, though, is that the chaconne thereby fits the commemoration of a principally Jewish tragedy into a Christian symbolism of suffering and redemption. Perhaps I should not worry: after all, two Jews, Vengerov and Kent, strongly feel otherwise.

Others have contended differently: indeed, in a BBC film, We Want The Light, by the documentarist Christopher Nupen, broadcast before the UK's Holocaust Memorial Day, today, the German-born Israeli politician Elyakim Haetzni says he found it hard to listen to Bach's St Matthew Passion "because we are accused there of something terrible [ Christ's murder], but the music is such that you cannot withstand it".

It is arguable that from Bach onward some German music, co-opted into supporting Hitler's perverted cultural project, was imbued with hatred for Jews. "Music", Norman Lebrecht wrote in the London Evening Standard at the time Nupen's film was screened, "needs to admit its Holocaust role, and atone". Maybe that atonement starts with Kent's film.

There will be, in any event, more to the 90-minute music memorial than Bach, many different kinds of commemoration, including music from the Jewish liturgy and a newly commissioned work for clarinet, brass and shofars (a ram's-horn trumpet sounded in synagogues during certain Jewish festivals) by the Jewish- Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov. The US pianist Emmanuel Ax will perform a mazurka and waltz by Chopin, pieces chosen partly to represent Poland and partly because they were used to "audition" inmates for the orchestras and bands at Auschwitz. There will also be a performance of the second movement of Messiaen's Quartet For The End Of Time, a piece written while the French composer was a prisoner of war in 1940 in Görlitz, in Silesia.

More significantly, perhaps, there will be a performance of music from the opera The Emperor Of Atlantis, Or The Denial of Death by Viktor Ullmann, sung by the Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley. Ullmann was an inmate of Theriesenstadt, which the Germans made into a "model" camp and invited the world to visit. There Ullmann was permitted to arrange songs for choral ensembles and also, in 1943, wrote this one-act opera. It was never performed in Theriesenstadt, as the SS halted rehearsals, perhaps because the emperor was a satirical portrait of Hitler. Ullmann was killed the following year in Auschwitz. "We think it is important that we are performing it 60 years later, if not on the site then as near as dammit to where this man was murdered," says Weston.

Kent's film will also include a performance by the Smith Quartet of Steve Reich's Different Trains, a piece inspired by the composer's youthful travels from New York to Los Angeles between 1939 and 1942, and by the Holocaust. "While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time," wrote Reich, "I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains."

The day after Vengerov's performance I watch Kent film the Smith Quartet performing Different Trains in the Birkenau "sauna", in fact a room used to disinfect inmates. Today it is a museum space whose walls are lined with family snapshots of Jews murdered in Birkenau. One wall of photographs provides a poignant backdrop to the film.

Later I learn more about the function of music in the camp when I interview an Auschwitz survivor, August Kowalczyk. We are sitting in a BBC catering bus parked in Birkenau, the camp known as Auschwitz 2, three kilometres from Auschwitz 1. Kowalczyk remembers the Strauss waltzes the orchestra of inmates was compelled to play as he and what he calls his fellow slave labourers marched under the Arbeit Macht Frei sign at the prison gate and into the camp after doing heavy labour: demolishing synagogues to provide bricks, building chemical works or, later, digging a drainage ditch for Birkenau.

Often, Kowalczyk says, he would march into camp carrying a man who had died during the day. They would lay the bodies of dead inmates opposite the orchestra while its members continued to play. "It was a terrible thing for these artists to be playing music when people were returning in such conditions," he says.

He draws a sketch in my notebook of how the dead were carried, one man holding each limb. "Such people were in a terrible state," he says. "Sometimes they were naked. At the same time the music was playing." He says that for the camp roll-call the dead were laid out alongside the living in order that the Nazi guards could ensure that the headcount tallied with the morning count.

Did the orchestra only play Strauss waltzes? "They also played arias from operas. It was generally light music of some description. They played military marches when we set off for work. In the mornings 15,000 people would go out of the camp, and they had to be counted very quickly. The music made it easier to get us out of camp faster." Kowalczyk, who was arrested by the Nazis in Slovakia in 1940, while trying to join the Polish army in France, spent one and a half years in Auschwitz.

The orchestra's musicians were also required to play for SS officers. Kowalczyk says: "There were special concerts with a programme prepared by the Lagerführer [head of the concentration camp] played near crematorium number one on Sundays. For most of the prisoners who could hear the music in their blocks it was a sentimental return to their homes, but for others it made them angry, because they thought the music was being abused."

The musicians were in a particularly poignant moral situation. They were often spared the worst work and conditions, but some felt guilty as a result. They were more likely to be spared the gas chambers.

Mahler's niece Alma Rose, an Auschwitz inmate who died in the camp, led the women's orchestra for a time, reportedly instilling discipline in her musicians by telling them: "If we don't play well we'll go to the gas." But accomplished playing did not always mean that musicians would be spared. By chance, on my flight from London to Cracow, I met a Polish woman living in the UK called Bozena Doliwa-Dobrucka, whose great-uncle was imprisoned at Auschwitz. His name was Olek Sotowicz, and he was a Polish underground fighter who later played trumpet, violin and piano in Auschwitz, but was killed by the SS. Bozena isn't quite certain why he was murdered, as so many orchestra members survived.

Kowalczyk, now 83, a retired actor and theatre director renowned throughout Poland, has agreed to be one of the survivors whose testimonies will be interspersed with music in the film. "Adorno said that there could be no poems after Auschwitz," says Kowalczyk. "But there are different poems. This is a different kind of commemoration."

Kowalczyk escaped on June 10th, 1942, from a gang that was building the drainage ditch for the new Birkenau camp. "Nine of us, including myself, got away, 13 died and 20 were recaptured." He escaped by taking off his striped uniform and running nearly naked through the fields. His Auschwitz story had an atypical ending: the museum estimates that between 1.1 million and 1.5 million died at Auschwitz's several camps, most of them Jews killed in Birkenau after the Nazis had decided on the final solution at the Wannsee Conference on January 20th, 1942.

Music had other roles in Auschwitz: to make the murderous task seem not just easier but also noble, part of a truly German cultural project. And to provide relaxation. George Steiner wrote: "We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning." We know too that many architects of genocide, such as Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Service, keenly appreciated German music. In Conspiracy, the HBO/BBC film of the Wannsee Conference, Kenneth Branagh's Heydrich, having just ordered the murder of 11 million Jews, picks up an LP of Schubert's Quintet in C major. "The adagio section will tear your heart out," he says as the music begins. How can we understand such men?

Back home I read Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity And The Holocaust, in which the sociologist challenges the idea that Auschwitz can only be understood as a failure of civilisation with the argument that our bureaucratised civilisation was in fact a sufficient if not necessary condition for the Holocaust.

What Bauman describes as a matter-of-fact efficiency was facilitated by the perverted use of Schubert, Strauss and Bach to help the Holocaust's perpetrators believe they were doing something noble. Worse yet, Bauman argues: "None of the societal conditions that made Auschwitz possible has truly disappeared and no effective measures have been undertaken to prevent such possibilities and principles from generating Auschwitz-like catastrophes."

No wonder, then, that the abuse of music is still with us. Pop songs were played before the massacres in Rwanda. Former detainees at Guantanamo Bay claim that strobe lighting and loudly amplified Eminem songs were pumped into the rooms where they were held.

But still, the Nazis excelled at music's inhuman use. They weren't just efficient killers. The historian Guido Fackler records in his essay Music In Auschwitz the case of the violinist Ota Sattler. Deported to Birkenau in 1944 from Theresienstadt, Sattler was forced to play Hot A Jid A Weibele (A Jew Had A Wife) as his wife and three sons filed past him to the gas chambers. ...

Guardian service

* Holocaust: A Music Memorial Film From Auschwitz is on BBC2 at 9 p.m. tomorrow.