The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum on the site of the former Nazi death camp in southern Poland has purchased a collection of musical scores that belonged to the camp's prison orchestra.
At the beginning of this year, to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, BBC Television produced a film which chronicled the significant role which music played in the daily life of the camp inmates through the eyes of survivors who were forced to play in the camp's orchestras. The film, which was made in coproduction with Polish TV, brought the universally expressive sound of music back into a camp as memorial to those who died. Less than a year after the film was shown, the Auschwitz Museum has bought a collection of scores which was used by the camp orchestra.
The scores include works by such composers as Giuseppe Verdi, Franz von Suppe, Josef Rixner and Carl Robrecht. Many of them are hand-written and bear the seal of the Auschwitz death camp. Some are signed by prisoners who played in the orchestra using their inmate numbers.
Historians say that several hundred musicians imprisoned in Auschwitz played in the camp orchestra for periods of various duration. But such orchestras, as Jaroslaw Mensfeld explains, were not an Auschwitz invention. There was an orchestra in the first Nazi camp set up in Dachau in 1933.
'It is not known how many members of the camp orchestra survived the Nazi atrocities' says museum curator Jaroslaw Mensfield. 'Those who did - as we were able to see in the BBC film - say that they owe their lives to their musical talent.'
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