News
The Auschwitz Museum Purchases Sheet Music Used by the Camp Orchestra
May 17, Bielsko-Biała (PAP-Polish Press Agency) – The Auschwitz-Birkenau State museum has purchased 24 sets of music used by the Auschwitz prisoner orchestra from a Polish collector. Collections department head Igor Bartosik said on Wednesday that the items will probably be included in a future Museum exhibition.
The acquisitions consist of the parts for various instruments, for pieces by Johann Strauss, Bruno Hauer, Karl Barth, Ludwig Siede, and Franz Lehar.
Bartosik announced that the preliminary cataloguing of the collection indicates that the music might date from as early as 1941. "These are only initial findings, but we know that the first sheet music in the camp came from a Leipzig publisher. The 24 sets that we have just purchased come from there." Bartosik added that the Museum purchased the music from a collector in southwestern Poland.
He recalled that the Museum collections already include 81 sets of sheet music from 1943, purchased last December from the same collector.
Before December 2005, the Museum held a few sets of sheet music that were found by Oświęcim residents immediately after liberation. Other sheet music was donated by the Music School in Łódź, to which they had previously been sent by a special commission that distributed abandoned German property after the war.
In her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Silesia, Cultural Life in Auschwitz Concentration Camp, Ewa Kuźma mentioned that the first concert, by an ensemble of 7 prisoner musicians, took place in January 1941. The camp orchestra expanded rapidly. When it began playing to accompany the columns of prisoners marching out to labor, it numbered 15 players. In May 1942, a symphony orchestra of 71 musicians was spun off from the brass band of about 100. The orchestra included some of the finest musicians in Europe, mostly Poles, but with some Russians, Czechs, Germans, and Jews.
The orchestra played at Auschwitz almost until liberation. (PAP)
