By Lianne Kolirin
A young British musician who painstakingly restored and completed an anonymous composition he found at Auschwitz has returned to Poland where he uncovered the composer’s identity.
Leo Geyer, a composer and conductor, discovered the fragments of musical scores by accident when he visited the Nazi death camp in 2015.
He had been there on a research trip having been commissioned to write a piece in memory of Martin Gilbert, the renowned Holocaust historian. While at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum, he was told by an archivist that there were remnants of musical scores arranged and played by orchestras at the camp.
The news was so remarkable that Geyer later returned to the camp to inspect the 210 pieces of “varying levels of completion”. He has since spent eight years assiduously piecing together what he calls “a broken jigsaw puzzle” to bring some of the music back to life.
Auschwitz, where about 1.1 million people perished, was home to at least six orchestras, formed of prisoners and commissioned by the SS. Many of the manuscripts they left behind are almost too faint to read. Others are damaged beyond recognition and interpreting them takes extensive musical detective work.
Geyer, whose research formed the basis of a doctorate at Oxford University, has researched the history of music at Auschwitz extensively, through speaking to survivors, trawling through witness testimonies and examining the scores, photographs and other documents.
One fragment in particular grabbed his attention because the handwriting closely resembled his own, but there were few clues as the music was incomplete and unsigned. The sketch was entitled “Daremne żale”, meaning “futile regrets” in Polish, and was found tucked inside half of a transcribed operetta.
Now, 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Geyer returned there as part of a Sky Arts documentary entitled The Lost Music of Auschwitz where he discovered that the piece was written by a man called Mieczysław Krzyński, the deputy conductor of the Auschwitz I orchestra.
He told the Religion Media Centre: “The main narrative that the documentary showcases is my journey to restore and bring back to life the unsigned and unfinished sketch called Daremne Żale.
“Over the course of the documentary, I show how by matching the handwriting of the sketch I was able to identify who the author is and the film concludes with the composition finally complete and performed in an orchestral context. It’s a very powerful and moving piece, racked with grief and sorrow and which was clearly written to express the world which surrounded him.”
Little else is known about Krzyński, other than that he is believed to have survived Auschwitz.
The documentary also tells the story of other musicians at the camp, including a Roma violinist, Jakub Segar. Geyer has written an homage to Segar, which is performed in the documentary beside the camp’s railway line on a violin that previously belonged to musicians in the camp’s women’s orchestra.
“It pays tribute to the astonishing story of Segar’s recruitment to the orchestra,” Geyer said. “Like all prisoners coming into Auschwitz, Segar was stripped of his clothes and his belongings. But he couldn’t bear to be parted from his violin and so he gave an astonishing display of his ability and it was during this performance that his life was spared and he was taken into the orchestra.
“By all accounts he was the best violinist the orchestra had, although he could not read music. Apparently, he only needed to hear a melody once and he would then play it back flawlessly. The piece is played by Antal Zalai, who is also a violinist of Roma ethnicity, and he plays it where Yacob Segar probably disembarked from the train.”
None of the manuscripts from the women’s orchestra have survived, but Geyer used testimonies from former members to recreate a Chopin arrangement with lyrics by the orchestra’s conductor, Alma Rose. The moving performance includes vocals by the opera singer Caroline Kennedy, whose family members died at Auschwitz.
The musical journey is interwoven with moving interviews with some of the last Holocaust survivors, as well as previously unbroadcast interviews and written testimony from musicians at Auschwitz.
“One of the things we wanted to showcase was how music was used as a force for good and also for evil,” Geyer said.
He discovered many examples of musicians rebelling, with secret performances, and weaving forbidden melodies into concerts. One of these was a Polish bugle call, which is poignantly played next to the railway lines for the cameras.
“There’s a real contrast in the music that listeners will hear,” he said. “That includes music that was performed for the SS including a foxtrot that was played on demand.”
The jolly upbeat melody is reproduced by an orchestra of instruments that would have been available to the inmates and with Geyer at the helm.
“It’s quite disturbing to hear this music,” he said. “This was the choice that the musicians had — it was either that or the gas chambers. This is what they had to do. This was the reality. Many people said, of course, that the orchestra enabled them to survive. Many people heard this Polish melody and that really gave them the strength and courage where they had none.
“Then you remember the marching music and the relentless beat of the drum and they also would see the orchestra as being part of the infrastructure of the camp. It was part of the mechanism to keep people in order and you can’t shy away from that truth.”
The Lost Music of Auschwitz is on Sky Arts at 9pm on Monday 20 January 2025.
