Commemorating Auschwitz’s Liberation

January 27, known as Holocaust Remembrance Day, marked 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp. BBC Arts tapped Two Rivers Media to commemorate the event with the feature documentary The Last Musician of Auschwitz. The 90-minute doc was co-funded by Access, which also had a hand in the Oscar-winning Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest and the documentary The Commandant’s Shadow.

“Access has a particular commitment to Holocaust education, and we believe we can make a contribution through powerful content,” Danny Cohen, president of Access, tells TV Real Weekly. “There are only so many projects we can take on, so we are very selective and look for projects that we believe can have a global impact.”

The Last Musician of Auschwitz tells the story of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who, along with other victims of Auschwitz, played and created music amid the terrors of the Holocaust. The film tells how prisoners were secretly composing music while in the camps, a powerful testament to the human spirit and the power of creativity despite living in the most brutal and dehumanizing of conditions. The documentary features Lasker-Wallfisch, now 99 years old, who is the only living musician to have played in one of the Auschwitz orchestras.

“We have been developing and producing The Last Musician of Auschwitz for almost two and a half years,” says Alan Clements, managing director and executive producer at Two Rivers Media. “Throughout that time, it has changed shape and direction, but Anita’s story as the last surviving member of the women’s orchestra was always going to be at its heart.”

Clements says it has been “brilliant to work closely with Anita and her family throughout the process and genuinely wonderful that her son, Raphael, is a key performer in the documentary. His performance on the cello of Schumann’s ‘Träumerei,’ a piece that Anita had been forced to play for Doctor Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s infamous ‘Angel of Death,’ was incredibly poignant, especially as that music celebrates childhood at a place where so many children were being tortured and murdered.

“Anita has spoken before, but we felt the mix of contemporary interview and a young actress speaking her memoirs was a powerful combination.”

The doc also weaves in the stories of four other musicians from all over Europe, now dead but whose music and words live on: from Krakow, classically trained pianist Adam Kopyciński; from Paris, composer Szymon Laks; from Berlin, choirmaster Martin Rosenberg, known as Rosebery d’Arguto; and, from Prague, singer-songwriter Ilse Weber. It includes a newly discovered work by Weber, never performed since the war, and a lullaby by Kopyciński, written in Auschwitz itself, recorded for the first time.

“Director Toby Trackman beautifully combined a variety of techniques to tell this compelling story,” Clements says. “As well as intimate interviews with Anita and the families of the other musicians featured, he creatively used archive and stark but powerful graphics inspired by musical notation to knit the film together. He also brought written testimonies and letters to life using actors delivering arresting monologues direct to camera. Then, of course, there are the powerful musical performances around Auschwitz itself—each was chosen not just for its link to one or other of the musicians we feature but also to move the bigger story we try to tell about the Holocaust, too. In one of the last sections of the film, to hear Liv Migdal perform ‘Wiegala,’ the lullaby that Ilse Weber sang to the children in her charge in the gas chamber, is unbelievably moving.”

Cohen adds, “The documentary uses music and song in a way that is very moving indeed. Through this music, we learn not just about what happened at Auschwitz but the way in which music became a source of hope and resistance for those trapped in the hell that the Nazis had created.”

As for what they hope viewers take away from having watched The Last Musician of Auschwitz, Cohen says: “That even in a place of such darkness, music was something that helped people stay alive, retain their humanity and hope for a brighter future.

“The documentary’s combination of first-person testimony, musical performance and dramatic reconstruction is highly ambitious, making the film a very distinctive and unique experience for international audiences.”

Clements adds, “There are many Holocaust documentaries, but we truly feel we have created something fresh and distinctive that will, hopefully, stimulate new audiences to reflect on the greatest crime in human history.”