14-12-2003

ALMA ROSÉ, die Geigerin von Auschwitz

(1906 - 1944)

19.5.2003

Tod eines Walzermädels

Die makabere Geschichte des Mädchenorchesters Auschwitz

RICHARD NEWMAN / KAREN KIRTLEY: Alma Rosé, Wien 1906 – Auschwitz 1944. Weidle Verlag, Bonn 2003. 500 Seiten. 34 Euro.  

Die jetzt vorgelegte, ausführliche  Biographie über Alma Rosé geht auf alle Verzerrungen und Irritationen ein, ohne selbst Partei zu ergreifen. Mit dieser wohl bedachten Distanz weisen die Verfasser nachdrücklich auf die sehr verständliche Tatsache hin, dass Menschen, die unter den unwürdigsten  Bedingungen vor sich hin vegetieren, mutig und hilfsbereit sein, aber eben auch ihre schlechten Seiten nach außen kehren können: Missgunst, Neid, Intriganten- und Denunziantentum.  

Ein sehr vielschichtiges Lebensmuster hat Newman nach langen, gründlichen Recherchen zusammengefügt, basierend auf dem Nachlass von Alfred Rosé, dem Bruder Almas, den er in Kanada kennen gelernt hat. Die reichhaltigen Dokumente und Briefe dieses Nachlasses schildern, wie das geliebte Kind einer wegen ihrer

Musikalität hochangesehen jüdischen Wiener Familie im KZ untergeht; nur 38 Jahre darf Alma Rosé leben. Ihr Vater Arnold ist Konzertmeister der Wiener Philharmoniker, Leiter des berühmten Rosé-Quartetts, ihre Mutter Justine Mahler die Schwester des Komponisten Gustav Mahler. Ihre Patentante  heißt Alma Mahler-Werfel, von der sie ihren Vornamen erhält.  

Kindheit, Jugend und Ausbildung der kleinen Alma sind belegt durch die ausführliche Korrespondenz zwischen den Familien Mahler und Rosé, die sich zunächst wie ein unbeschwertes „Who is Who“ aus besseren und besten Kreisen liest, wo gesellschaftliche Formen, Familientraditionen und die Geborgenheit  eines gehobenen Milieus selbstverständlich und unantastbar   zu sein scheinen.

Alma wird als eine eigenwillige kleine Person geschildert, durchsetzungsfreudig, lebensfroh, auch kapriziös, sie entwickelt sich zu einer jungen Frau, die weiß, was sie will und die begabt ist: Als Geigenvirtuosin gründet sie ein eigenes Ensemble, „Die Wiener Walzermädeln“, mit dem sie durch Europa reist. Dem Vater bleibt sie persönlich und musikalisch eng verbunden. Sie heiratet einen bekannten, aus der Tschechoslowakei stammenden Geiger; die Ehe wird später geschieden.

Als sich die politische Landschaft verdüstert und der Anschluss Österreichs folgt, emigrieren Vater und Tochter nach London, die Mutter ist noch in Wien verstorben. Von London aus reist Alma nach Holland, um dort durch Auftritte das dringend benötigte Geld für den Lebensunterhalt zu verdienen. Sie verpasst die rechtzeitige Rückkehr nach London, geht in Holland eine Scheinehe ein, die ihr die Flucht ermöglichen soll, wird in Frankreich verhaftet und nach Auschwitz verbracht. Dort stürzt sie sich voller Besessenheit   in die Orchesterarbeit, sie wird ihre Ersatzexistenz, Alma versucht, das Lager mit Hilfe ihrer Musik zu überstehen. Doch schließlich stirbt sie an den Folgen einer Vergiftung .

„Wann glaubst Du, wird es für uns ein Wiedersehen geben? Dieses Nichtleben kann man doch nie mehr nachholen“, schreibt Alma im November 1941 aus Utrecht an ihren Bruder, der in die USA emigriert war. Drei Jahre später ist sie tot, sie erhält keine Chance mehr, dieses „Nichtleben“ nachzuholen.

BIRGIT WEIDINGER

Die Geigerin von Auschwitz

Richard Newman befreit Alma Rosé aus den Fängen des kitschigen Mythos

von Ulrich Weinzierl

Richard Newman (mit Karen Kirtley):
Alma Rosé. Wien 1906 - Auschwitz 1944.
Eine Biografie.
A. d. Amerikan. v. Wolfgang Schlüter.
Weidle, Bonn. 380 S., 34 EUR.

Artikel erschienen am 5. Apr 2003

Das wichtigste Verdienst von Richard Newmans Biografie ist der weithin gelungene Versuch, Alma Rosés widersprüchlicher Persönlichkeit im umfassenden Sinn Gerechtigkeit widerfahren zu lassen. Dazu bedarf es vieler Zeugnisse, abwägenden Urteils und intimer Kenntnis der Zeitumstände. Dem Biografen stand eine Fülle unveröffentlichten Materials zur Verfügung, vor allem zahlreiche Briefe aus der Mahler-Rosé-Collection der University of Western Ontario. Kleinere Ungenauigkeiten in Terminologie und kulturgeschichtlichem Kontext sind unschwer zu entschuldigen, wahrscheinlich sogar kaum zu vermeiden.

Entmythologisierung war die Devise Newmans. Als nach dem Weltkrieg Gerüchte über einen Selbstmord Alma Rosés kursierten, schrieb der philosophische Schriftsteller Günther Anders ihr zum Gedächtnis ein schönes, ein pathetisches Gedicht: Der "Nachruf" auf die Musikerin, der man abverlangt habe, bei Hinrichtungen aufzuspielen, schließt mit Versen im Konjunktiv indirekter Rede: "Die Überlebenden bürgen für die Wahrheit. / Dann habe sie ruhig, und als sei jeder Schritt festgelegt, das Notwendige getan: / Ihre Geige an einem / Eisenhaken der Baracke zerschlagen; und am nächsten Morgen / selbst sich erhängt. Ehre sei ihrem Namen. Sie hieß / Alma Rosé."

Die historische Wahrheit lautet allerdings anders. Alma Rosé starb am 4. April 1944 an Botulismus, einer Lebensmittelvergiftung, die sich bei einer Geburtstagsfeier der Kapo Schmidt durch verdorbene Konserven zugezogen hatte. Vergeblich versuchte Dr. Mengele persönlich, sie zu retten, veranlasste eine Lumbalpunktion und schickte die Probe ins SS-Labor. Als "Dienstgrad, Einheit" der Patientin vermerkt das Formular bloß die eintätowierte Häftlingsnummer: 50381. Alma Rosé wurde bis zuletzt Sonderbehandlung der SS im nicht letalen Sinn zuteil. Auch ihre potenziellen Mörder versagten "Frau Alma", so die Anrede der Wächter und Schergen, nicht den Respekt. Man bahrte die Leiche auf und nahm von ihr Abschied, so würdevoll das eben in diesem Höllenkreis möglich war.

Ein Vergleich von Newmans sorgsamer Studie mit Fania Fénelons fast romanhafter, ichbezogener Schilderung ist lehrreich. Von Alma Rosés Vorgeschichte hatte die Fénelon keine Ahnung, da regiert blühende, eher unfreundliche Fantasie. Newman bringt auch hier Licht ins Dunkel. Penibel zeichnet er Almas Bemühungen nach, einerseits den Erwartungen ihres vergötterten Vaters zu entsprechen, andererseits aus seinem Schatten zu treten. Diese Gratwanderung glückte ihr erst spät. Eine einzige historische Aufnahme ihrer künstlerischen Leistungen ist überliefert: Bachs Konzert für zwei Violinen und Streicher d-moll BWV 1043 von anno 1928. Naturgemäß spielte sie die zweite Geige, Arnold Rosé die erste. Von Váša Příhoda   stammt das Diktum: "Habe ich eigentlich Alma geheiratet oder ihren Vater?" Dass die Ehe 1935 geschieden wurde, sieht Newman auch vor dem Hintergrund der nationalsozialistischen Rassenpolitik. Trennte sich Prihoda von Alma, weil er aufgrund der Ehe mit einer Jüdin Nachteile befürchtete? Dagegen spricht, dass auch seine zweite Frau "nichtarisch" war. Almas Selbstverwirklichungsprozess wurde, nach einer Phase der Verzweiflung, durch die Trennung jedenfalls befördert. Plötzlich stand sie auf eigenen Beinen. Mit absoluter Disziplin und Professionalität verfolgte sie ihre Karriere. Sie konnte darin hart, ja rücksichtslos sein. Nach dem "Anschluss" Österreichs 1938 setzte sie alles daran, den mittlerweile schon hochbetagten Arnold Rosé ins rettende englische Exil zu bringen. Für ihn, auch materiell, zu sorgen, ihm das Alter zu erleichtern, war ihr höchstes Ziel. Der Gedanke, er müsse eines Tages die Stradivari verkaufen, ein Geschenk seiner Verehrergemeinde auf Initiative von Mysa Gräfin Wydenbruck, war ihr unerträglich. Darum auch fasste sie einen, für ihre Freunde unfassbaren, Entschluss: Ende 1939 reiste sie aus dem sicheren England auf den Kontinent, um ein finanziell lohnendes Engagement in Amsterdam anzutreten. Blind für die Gefahr rundum, war ihr schließlich die Rückkehr verwehrt. Wie und dass sie es schaffte, in den von deutschen Truppen okkupierten Niederlanden bis Dezember 1942 (!) auszuharren und zu konzertieren, grenzt an ein Wunder und zeugt von ihrer unbändigen Energie. Der allzu späte Versuch, in die Schweiz zu fliehen, scheiterte in Dijon. Die nächste Station war das Auslieferungslager Drancy. Im Juli 1943 wurde Alma Rosé nach Auschwitz deportiert. Aus dem berüchtigten Experimentierblock, in dem sich Nazimediziner "wissenschaftlich" an ihren Opfern austoben durften, befreite sie ihr Name - die Nachricht von ihrer Einlieferung machte im Lager schnell die Runde. Alma Rosé wurde ausersehen, das neugegründete Frauenorchester von Birkenau zu leiten, das im Gegensatz zum Männerorchester von Auschwitz beinah ausschließlich aus Amateuren bestand. Tag und Nacht arbeitete Alma Rosé an der Verbesserung des Tones, drillte die Dilettantenversammlung zu einem veritablen Klangkörper. Dabei schonte sie weder sich noch die Orchestermitglieder. Übereinstimmende Berichte über Wutausbrüche, Ohrfeigen und Strafen für "patzende" oder aussichtslos unbegabte Spielerinnen liegen vor. So wurde sie bewundert und gehasst zugleich, und das oft von denselben Leuten. Gleichwohl zweifelt niemand daran, dass sie mit ihrem Perfektionswahn vielen Mithäftlingen das Leben gerettet hat. Sie konnte sich Dinge erlauben, von denen andere nicht einmal zu träumen wagten, und forderte lebenswichtige Vergünstigungen für ihre Kapelle. Der Eitelkeit der Lagerführerin schmeichelte es, in ihrem Sklavenreich ein qualitativ hochwertiges Ensemble zu besitzen. Selbst abgebrühte Massenmörder reagierten auf einschmeichelnde Melodien sentimental, zumal dann, wenn eine Solistin wie Alma Rosé am virtuosen Werk war. Den Horror ihrer Existenz vermochte sie wohl einzig und allein durch äußerste Konzentration zu ertragen, vielleicht auch zu verdrängen. Im KZ lebte sie buchstäblich für die Kunst und von ihr. Nur ihre Musik bewahrte sie vor der Gaskammer. War sie zufrieden mit dem Orchester, dann äußerte sie als höchstes Lob die Anerkennung einer ewigen Tochter: "Das könnte sogar mein Vater hören."

       The Jerusalem

Report .com

A Waltz to the Death

Netty C. Gross

When Alma Rosé took charge of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra, she thought her life had been saved. But she was really just playing for time.

It's hard to imagine what went though the minds of fully identifying Jews who lingered in Auschwitz long enough to witness the horrors and then perished, leaving no record. It’s harder still to imagine what might have gone through the mind of Alma Rosé, the 36-year-old Viennese violinist who was deported to Auschwitz, where she conducted the camp’s fledgling Women’s Orchestra until her own frightful and mysterious death there in 1944. For Alma Rosé was a maternal niece of Gustave Mahler and daughter of Arnold Rosé, the eminent violinist and concertmaster of the Vienna Opera and Philharmonic orchestras until his forced retirement in 1938.

And though her family was Jewish in origin, Alma, like other family members, was deeply enmeshed in Viennese cultural life and had nothing to do with Judaism in any of its religious, cultural or political manifestations. She could never have expected to find herself at Auschwitz, and once there must have thought she had found the means to ensure her survival.

The Mahler-Rosé clan, in fact, was made up of ardent assimilationists who saw their Jewish ancestry as a serious obstacle to their professional careers and social advancement. In 1897 Mahler, anxious to attain the directorship of the Vienna Court Opera, a position open only to Christians, converted to Catholicism, and Arnold Rosé, the son of a Romanian Jewish tailor named Hermann Rosénblum, became an Evangelical. Alma’s mother, Justine (Mahler’s younger sister), who was said to dislike vacationing in resorts frequented by Jews, baptized her children as Protestants, and was relieved when her musician son Alfred embraced Catholicism just prior to his marriage to a Roman Catholic. Alma, who in 1927, at the age of 19, had her nose surgically altered, was herself baptized as a Catholic in 1933.

For a while it all paid off. The Rosés had to face occasional anti-Semitic comments as Protestant and Catholic Jews, as such converts were known, but overall, they were the toasts of the town. In 1913, Viennese art patrons honored Alma’s father with a gift of a 200-year-old Stradivarius violin. Music giants like Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini, Alban Berg, Richard Strauss, Anton Webern and Rudolph Bing (later longtime director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera) were regulars at Justine’s salon. The family summered in Black Forest resorts with Thomas Mann. One of Alma’s good friends at the Vienna Conservatory was Gretl Slezak, who would later become a close personal friend of Adolf Hitler. And though Alma, it turns out, was not especially gifted, her solo debut at age 16 was a Vienna social event that was prominently covered in the local press.

In 1930, Alma became even more famous, marrying the non-Jewish Czech violinist Váša Příhoda   — who would divorce her five years later. In 1932, she struck out on her own, establishing and playing violin in the “Wiener Waltzermadlen,” the Vienna Waltzing Girls, a light-music ensemble that blithely toured around an increasingly tense Europe well into the decade.

Yet despite all this, in July 1943, she found herself in a sealed boxcar hurtling from the Drancy concentration camp to Auschwitz. There, she was condemned to the frightful Block 10, where Jewish women prisoners were subjected to medical experiments. A chance opportunity to play a violin spared her and led to her assuming the orchestra position — one that eventually gave Alma the status of a privileged Jewish kapo and, by the book’s telling, unprecedented influence in Birkenau. The music-obsessed SS officers who ran this sister camp of Auschwitz, could, after a day of selections and gassings, enjoy a good cry upon hearing a Beethoven sonata.

Grotesquely, it was in Birkenau that Rosé — who desperately sought during her brief lifetime to escape the shadows of her uncle’s, father’s and husband’s immense reputations, craving musical recognition in her own right — reached the apex of her career. Conducting a rag-tag orchestra of 45 terrified, hungry women in the shadow of the gas chambers, she and they were able to stay alive. Alma managed to have her racial status reduced to that of mischlinge, or mixed-breed Jew, lived in a private room, wore ordinary street clothes, and was not required to shave her head. The camp’s SS men even addressed her as “Frau Alma.”

But Frau Alma’s tenure at Auschwitz was complicated. Charges were made after the war that Alma was a cruel kapo who could fall into a rage over a false note, slapped, beat and brutally punished orchestra members and even expelled them from the block. The latter was a virtual death sentence — although, in fact, no Jewish players died on her watch.

There were also accusations that she cozied up to the SS. She became uniquely close to SS officer Maria Mandel, a fanatic music lover and sadist who was tried for her crimes by a Krakow court and hung in 1947. Indeed, according to one account, on the eve of her own death, Alma believed she was about to be freed from Birkenau.

Her demise, which occurred immediately on her return “home” to the camp’s music block from a birthday party for a kapo, remains a mystery. She was either intentionally poisoned or died of food poisoning. Among the potential killers were rival, non-Jewish kapos and SS officers who felt she had become, for a Jew, too powerful, or perhaps even Mandel — who once lavished three days of treats and gifts on a small boy before personally leading him to the gas chamber. But the Auschwitz establishment was apparently distressed: As Alma lay dying in a private room at the Revier, the camp infirmary, Newman tells us, a concerned Josef Mengele came to her bedside and ordered a spinal tap.

NEWMAN’S IS AN AMBITIOUS and richly detailed book that tells an extraordinary story. Problematically, it’s also a labor of love. Newman, a veteran Canadian journalist, first heard about Alma Rosé in 1963 from her brother Alfred, who had managed to escape to the U.S. and later moved to Canada. Intrigued, Newman spent decades assembling material and interviewing surviving orchestra members. The project gained focus, he explains, after the 1974 publication in French of a memoir by orchestra survivor Fania Fenelon, which, by Newman’s telling, portrays Alma in an unflattering light. In 1980 Fenelon’s book became the basis for the TV movie “Playing for Time,” perhaps best remembered because the former inmate objected to being depicted in the film by Vanessa Redgrave, then notorious for her vocal support of the PLO. (Alma’s role was played by Jane Alexander.)

This new biography, Newman writes, is meant first and foremost to “honor” Alma. Though he dutifully raises the various Nazi-collusion and prisoner ill-treatment charges, he dismisses or excuses them all, insisting that Alma was just trying to keep the orchestra in shape so that the Nazis wouldn’t have any excuse to gas the players. And so, while it brims with gripping material, the biography suffers repeatedly from Newman’s uncritical affection for Alma and her family and his, at times, apologetic tone.

Ultimately, Newman is unable to rise above his role as devoted family chronicler. For example, though Newman appears to think he has given a fairly affectionate rendering, to this reader, Arnold — “Vati” to his children — is a regular Leopold Mozart, who has explosive fits when teaching young Alfred (Alma, by contrast, gets kid-glove treatment), and Justine, despite the multiple baptisms, is as imperious and meddling a European Jewish mother as they come. Still, despite Newman’s best efforts to make her seem appealing, Alma emerges in the pre-Auschwitz part of the biography as a petulant Daddy’s girl, whose stubborn failure to recognize that she’s no world-class virtuoso is fused, somehow, to her overwhelming desire to please Vati.

In the end, achieving musical glory, at all costs, is what the family lives and ultimately what Alma dies for. In fact, it was the music-obsessed family’s utter conviction that they had successfully rid themselves of their Jewish past that would doom Alma. Newman seems to miss this crucial point, noting merely that the family was “caught off guard” by Nazism. Incredibly, though she and her aged father had managed to escape to London in 1939 shortly before the war, Alma, still sure that she could make a name for herself in Europe, flew to Holland for music engagements. There she became trapped, when the Germans invaded, the following May. She was caught in 1942, after fleeing to France.

Despite the author’s declared intention to honor Alma as a hero, the biography only deepens the questions about her. Newman makes the case that she was petrified of and detested the Nazis and even considered suicide. But he also tells us, admiringly, that once ensconced in Auschwitz, Alma was sought after by the Nazis and worshiped as a “goddess” for her violin playing. It was there, perversely, that she achieved the celebrity and honor that she so craved. It’s horrible to ask, but the book begs the question: Did Auschwitz give Alma Rosé the success she would never have won elsewhere?

Also unclear are Alma’s thoughts about being defined as a Jew by the Nazis. By Newman’s telling, Alma evinced some solidarity with Jews by selecting them for the orchestra, though this entailed a degree of risk for her. He also interviewed a survivor who told him that Alma came to believe that Prihoda divorced her to advance his own career in Nazi Europe, and that two subsequent non-Jewish Dutch lovers also dumped her in 1940 because of her Jewish ancestry.

Yet, to the death, it appears that Alma did not understand why she, who had no tie to Judaism beyond a biological connection to four Jewish grandparents, landed in Auschwitz. Self-stripped of the faith and its history, she also lacked any understanding of the historical currents buffeting her. “It is very terrible,” Alma is said to have remarked to a colleague as they witnessed loaded transports on the way to the gas chamber and heard the screams of Jewish women in the wind. “Why are the Germans doing such things?”

The true humanity of Alma Rosé

by Norman Lebrecht / April 5, 2000

THE morning they took my neighbour Eleanor away for cremation, there arrived in the post a 1928 recording of her uncle and cousin playing the Bach double-violin concerto. Her uncle was Arnold Rosé, concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for half a century and brother-in-law of Gustav Mahler. His daughter, Alma, named after Mahler's wife, would end her days conducting the women's orchestra in Auschwitz.

Eleanor Rosé talked often about Alma, who had fled with her father to London in 1939, only to return to Europe. A fancified account of her Auschwitz orchestra, by Fania Fénelon, was filmed in 1980 as Playing for Time, with a script by Arthur Miller, and Vanessa Redgrave as the heroine, Fania. Alma, dubiously depicted as arrogant and cruel, was played by Jane Alexander.

Among those who protested at the distortion was Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a cellist in the English Chamber Orchestra who recalled Alma as "a woman of immense strength and dignity . . . who helped us to survive".

The circumstances of Alma's death appeared to be unnatural even for Auschwitz, but so little was known about her that refuting the movie's account seemed impossible. Who was this imposing woman who clung to musical values in a place of genocide? Why had she fled from British refuge and how exactly did she die?

These mysteries can now be resolved, as a result of 30 years' research by a Canadian journalist and a German precision-tools engineer, working independently of one another. Richard Newman has written a biography of Alma, to be published next month by Amadeus Press. Wolfgang Wendel has issued an album of Rosé family recordings, furnished with testimonies of Auschwitz orchestra survivors.

From pieced-together shards of painful memory, there emerges a silhouette of a tantalising musician who overcame the twin handicaps of a famous name and modest talent to express a surreal humanity in the midst of mass extermination.

From her birth, on November 3, 1906, Alma was groomed for stardust by a father who had pulled himself up by his fiddle-strings from Romanian poverty to Viennese glory. Her brother, Alfred, was a weak musician. The weight of the Rosé name fell on Alma.

Early reviews from summer spas speak of her beauty rather than vivid talent.Mahler's daughter, Anna, described her to me as a vulnerable, lovable girl. Arnold launched her in Vienna with the Bach double concerto. When the glittering dates failed to follow, Alma did the next best thing - she fell in love with a top-flight soloist.

Váša Příhoda  was as celebrated in central Europe as Heifetz was in America, a Czech violinist who could seemingly play anything twice as fast as anyone else. With Alfred's blessing, he married Alma in 1930 - only to discover that she could neither boil an egg nor make a bed. Top violinists require a high level of spousal maintenance. When Alma could not satisfy his needs, Příhoda looked elsewhere. He divorced her in 1935, leaving Alma devastated.

She, meanwhile, had found her musical niche as leader of the Wiener Walzermädeln, a salon orchestra that played Viennese sweetmeats at home and abroad. She fell in love with Heini Salzer, the tall, blond son of a paper manufacturer. He was eight years her junior and extremely shy.

When Austria merged with Hitler's Germany in March 1938, their relationship was put in jeopardy. The Rosés were Jewish by birth, Catholic by conversion. Alma, with help from Sir Adrian Boult, brought the aged Arnold to London. Heini came too.

Alma eventually took a flat in Maida Vale and set about looking after Arnold and Heini. One day she came home to find Heini gone, flown to Vienna. Heartbroken and cut off by war, she went to neutral Holland in November 1939 to find work and make contact with Heini. Dutch music-lovers, who remembered Mahler and her father, were glad to hear her play. Heini wrote to say he was getting married.

Then the Nazis invaded Holland and her existence became precarious. Alma, charming and resourceful, gave concerts in private houses. She had a brief love affair with a Nazi officer, which may have eased her freedom of movement. When the Jews were rounded up, she entered a fictitious marriage.

Friends warned that her cover was blown and offered to hide her; she preferred to attempt an underground route to Switzerland, leaving her violin behind. Along the way, at Dijon in December 1942, she was betrayed to the Gestapo, arrested and sent to the Drancy camp outside Paris, and from there to Auschwitz.

That this pampered cultural princess should have survived the first selection at Auschwitz was itself miraculous. She was sent to the notorious medical experimentation block at Birkenau, where a Dutchwoman recognised her and told the SS that she was a famous musician.

She was given a violin and put in charge of a women's orchestra that played jolly tunes as the prisoners trooped out and back from work each day. There are conflicting reports as to whether or not they performed as newcomers were selected for life or death.

Alma instilled fierce discipline into her band, warning that if they did not play well they might all be sent "to the gas". Time after time, she saved members of her orchestra from instant death.

For her, music was an ideal and an escape. Excellence was its own reward. The SS addressed her respectfully as "Frau Alma". She flew into violent rages with her musicians but never adopted the sadistic ways of other privileged prisoners, who resented her aloofness.

In April 1944 she attended a block-leader's birthday party and came back nauseous and vomiting. Unusually, she was given a private room in the experimental hospital, with real bedding. Her stomach was pumped and she was visited by the dreaded Dr Mengele. She died two days later, on April 5.

Extraordinarily in Auschwitz, where thousands were gassed and burned daily, Alma's body was laid out as if for burial. It was then sent for autopsy, before cremation. Why would the Nazis have investigated one death among millions?

Newman believes that her symptoms aroused suspicions of cholera, which could have infected the SS. There were also rumours that she had been poisoned by a rival block leader. The likeliest cause of death, however, was botulism, brought on by eating food from a damaged can. Among all the victims of Auschwitz, Alma Rosé managed to die an almost natural death. She was 36 years old.

One morning in 1945 (so Eleanor told me), two nuns in black called at Arnold's door in Blackheath, handed him a violin case and departed without a word. The case contained Alma's precious 1757 Guadagnini. It had been hidden by Dutch friends, who restored it to her ailing father. He sold the instrument to the Viennese-born concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where its sweet tone was heard for two decades.

Years later, at Eleanor's obsequies in 1992, we put on the disc of the two Rosés playing Bach. It is the only sound of Alma's to survive.

Classical Music Web

Alma Maria Rosé was born in 1906 to Viennese "musical royalty". Her mother was Gustav Mahler's sister Justine and her father was Arnold Rosé, for over fifty years the Concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic and State Opera Orchestras and leader of the legendary Rosé Quartet. Alma, named after her Aunt who was Uncle Gustav's wife, first knew only a world of music and a world where music making meant renown and privilege. The early part of this book details this lost world as almost a "Who's Who" of musical Vienna seemed to spend time it's in the Rosé household. By the very end of Alma's story, however, music would have become the difference between life and death.

Alma grew up beautiful, clever and talented as a violinist like her father. When she married the Czech violinist Váša Příhoda   in 1930 the two went on tours together. Even though he appears to have been given more of the attention, Prihoda still resented Alma's presence, resented the name of his famous wife, not to mention her getting in the way of his philandering and the tours tailed off. Then in 1932, in a bizarre pre-echo of what would be her eventual fate, Alma founded and led an all-woman orchestra, "The Vienna Waltzing Girls". They were a big draw with audiences. Leaving aside the fact that this was a top class string orchestra, the fact that they were also pretty girls in flouncy frocks guaranteed attention and Alma had a winner.

Her family was Jewish but Arnold Rosé cared little about religion. Like many assimilated Jews of his musical circle his art was his god. Though baptized as a Protestant and then converted to Catholicism when she married Prihoda, Alma also appeared to be of the same mind as her father. But this was now Europe in the 1930s, Nazism was spreading, anti-Jewish laws were soon enacting the resurgent anti-Semitism always beneath the surface in Europe in the first half of the 20th century and the Nazis determined who was Jewish and who was not. In the end "The Waltzing Girls" found their dates gradually being canceled causing them finally to fetch up penniless in Munich in 1933 where Prihoda had to pay their debts to get them back to Vienna. Two years later Prihoda and Alma divorced and new Nazi racial laws meant the days of "The Waltzing Girls" were numbered. When Hitler turned the screw on Austria, Jewish musicians found it harder and harder to perform and by 1938 the group disbanded completely. Alma still worked in Holland but the sky was darkening and she decided to get her aging parents out of Europe altogether.

Enlisting the help of her old friend Bruno Walter, she got her father to England just after the death of her mother. Alma even came to London with the old man but then fatally went back to Holland to carry on working as a virtuoso, even staying when the Nazis came, playing in private homes to earn enough to live. When the Nazis inevitably decided to clear Holland of all Jews she tried to cheat the SS but, in the end, while attempting escape to Switzerland, she was betrayed, captured and sent to Auschwitz. Had it not been for her musical ability she would have become victim of the medical experiments of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. But fate had other ideas. Saved by her name and talent she was appointed director of the recently formed women's orchestra in the camp.

For ten months she shaped a large number of starved and terrified girls into a brilliant orchestra using whatever talent they had in whatever instruments they could play on. Mozart played on accordions and mandolins, as well as violins and pianos, for example. So impressed were the camp masters by Alma's exacting standards that visiting Nazi leaders were given special performances by this remarkable ensemble whose fame spread through the hierarchy of the "new order". By doing so Alma undoubtedly saved the lives of her players because if they played and played well they would not be sent to the gas, or Dr. Mengele. It was as simple as that. That Alma herself did not survive the camp with the fifty or so women she inspired and who owed her their lives was probably due to one of the many ironies that cut through this story. Among "privileges" granted her and her musicians by the camp for what they did was better food rations. At a special dinner given for her by Nazi guards she seems to have contracted botulism from a contaminated can of meat and died from it in April 1944. One final, appalling irony then remained. One of the doctors who tried to save her was Josef Mengele himself. After her death, after she was laid out honorably on a catafalque, he came to see the woman whose music making had moved him to tears many times. A singer with the orchestra, Fania Fénelon described the visit: "Elegant, distinguished, he took a few steps, then stopped by the wall where we had hung up Alma's arm band and baton. Respectfully, heels together, he stood quietly for a moment, then said in a penetrating tone, 'In memoriam.'" That is one of many contradictions you are forced to face in the course of this book.

In "Playing for Time" Fania Fénelon wrote of her own time as a member of the women's orchestra in Auschwitz, leading to her survival. But Fénelon had entered the camp after Alma Rosé and came to see her as little more than a tyrant and so left a very unsympathetic view that was skewed and biased. For example, Fénelon knew nothing of what Alma had been through prior to Auschwitz and, crucially, her early days in the camp. Especially she knew nothing of Alma's courage in standing up to the SS with the certainty that whatever she did would save many lives. But you can read it all now because Richard Newman was a friend of Alma's brother Alfred who, in Canada long after the war ended, discovered a large collection of Alma's letters that paint a different portrait from that of Fénelon. Newman also heard from Alfred Rosé's widow a story that an Auschwitz survivor that his sister had indeed saved the lives of many Jewish and non-Jewish girls in Auschwitz by her courage. And this is the touchstone for this book in which Richard Newman with Karen Kirtley set out to put the record straight about their subject at last. Their attention to detail, thorough research over many years and painstaking zeal to piece together the tatters of evidence that remain to get as close to the truth as possible is as compelling and moving as the story that emerges. Their detailing of daily life in the corner of Auschwitz that the women occupied is especially impressive in its grotesque detail. This is not hagiography, though. It's a rounded, warts and all portrait of a life whose appalling end inspires as well as saddens beyond words. Not an easy book to read, principally because you know from the start how it will end, throwing the carefree glitter of the earlier episodes into tragic relief. But read it you should.

A true story brilliantly told where music comes to mean the difference between life and death and where life is stranger and crueler than fiction could ever be.

Tony Duggan