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.

You are invited to join us for the book presentation of “The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz” A Story of Survival by Anne Sebba. Anne will read from her work, followed by a discussion with Bret Werb, Music Curator at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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of ELEVEN books including the best-selling biography THAT WOMAN, a life of Wallis Simpson based on her discovery of 15 unpublished letters locked away in an attic trunk.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.