Wednesday, January 28, 2026 at 7:00PM
Hebrew Union College
1 West 4th Street (at Broadway), New York, NY10012

Reception and Book Signing to follow. Please, RSVP.

Musical Program

Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) – Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64

I. Allegro molto appassionato (excerpt)
arranged by O. Schnirlin and W. Schimmel

Sarah Vonsattel, violin
William Schimmel, accordion

Szymon Laks (1901–1983) – Warsaw Polonaise No. 3

William Schimmel, accordion

Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) –  “In mir klingt ein Lied” (Alma Rosé’s Resistance Song)

Original lyrics by Ernst Marischka (1893–1963)

Emily Donato, soprano
Sarah Vonsattel, violin
Roy Feldhusen, piano

Robert Schumann (1810–1856) – Träumerei, from Kinderszenen, Op. 15

arranged by K. Krantz and W. Schimmel

Eliot Bailen, cello
William Schimmel, accordion

British author Anne Sebba presents her 2025 book The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival in an evening combining discussion and live music. The program explores the history of women musicians forced to perform at Auschwitz during the Holocaust and the role music played in survival, coercion, and memory.

Sebba will be joined in conversation by Dr. Bret Werb, Music Curator at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and a member of the Holocaust Music Lost & Found (HMLF) Advisory Board. Published to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camps, the book draws on extensive research to illuminate the experiences of the Women’s Orchestra, including its leader Alma Rosé, the Austrian violinist who assembled and conducted the ensemble until her death in Auschwitz in 1944.

The evening will feature live performances of works by Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Szymon Laks—music performed by members of the Women’s and Men’s Orchestras at Auschwitz—followed by a reception and book signing.

The event is hosted by Holocaust Music Lost & Found (HMLF), an organization dedicated to the study, recovery, and performance of music by composers whose lives and careers were disrupted or destroyed during the Holocaust, and to confronting antisemitism and hate through scholarship and performance.

About the Book:

This is a book about the resilience of the human spirit and the role that music played in helping a group of almost fifty women and girls from eleven nations survive against the odds in the horrors of Auschwitz. It is a story of sisterhood and survival against the backdrop of a fundamental absurdity, music in a death camp, and was driven by the tenacity and determination of Alma Rosé, the 36-year-old virtuoso violinist niece of Gustav Mahler.

Rosé was spared her life by the Nazis in exchange for conducting a marching band which had to play twice a day in all weathers as other women prisoners were forced to march out to work in the fields and in the subcamps. Some of the musicians also had to play Sunday concerts for Nazi officers and occasionally were commanded to give solo performance. They had little in the way of additional privileges beyond the greatest privilege of all, the hope that being in the orchestra might save their lives. But at what cost?

About Author:

Anne Sebba FRSL is the prize-winning author of ELEVEN books including the best-selling biography THAT WOMAN, a life of Wallis Simpson based on her discovery of 15 unpublished letters locked away in an attic trunk. Her next book was Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940’s about a wide variety of women and how they behaved in wartime Paris published in the US, UK, China, France and the Czech Republic, winner of the Franco-British award. She has also written biographies of Jennie Churchill, Mother Teresa and Laura Ashley among others.

In 2024 Anne was a judge for the inaugural non-fiction Women’s Prize. She makes regular television appearances and has presented programmes for BBC R3 and R4 including two about the pianists, Harriet Cohen and Joyce Hatto. She began her working career as a foreign correspondent for Reuters news agency, the first woman accepted on their graduate trainee scheme, and has also worked for the BBC world services in their Arabic department, although she does not speak a word of Arabic. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, a Trustee of the National Archives Trust and a former chair of Britain’s 10,000 strong Society of Authors Management Committee.

In 2021 she published to great acclaim a life of Ethel Rosenberg, electrocuted in 1953 aged 37 for conspiracy to commit espionage following a trial with multiple miscarriages of justice, optioned by Miramax and shortlisted for the Wingate Prize. Her latest book is The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, a Story of Survival, published in the UK in March 2025, to commemorate the 80TH anniversary of the liberation of the camps and in the US in September 2025. The book will be translated into Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Finnish, Romanian and Chinese. Anne also works as a reviewer, journalist, after dinner speaker and lecturer on cruises, is an accredited speaker for the Arts Society as well as various other institutions and schools in the UK and US including the British Library, Royal Oak, English Speaking Union and the National Trust.

Holocaust Music Lost & Found presents author Anne Sebba for a reading and discussion, featuring music of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz. This event is supported by the Polish Cultural Institute New York.