Books about survival never make for an easy read. The Violinist of Auschwitz is no exception to this. I received an ARC of the book from NetGalley and Pen & Sword, and I’m so glad to have read this one.

Jean-Jacques Felstein did not have the most present or warm mother. As a child, he craved her attention and love but found her somewhat distant. But there was a good reason why Elsa, Jean-Jacques’ mother was the way she was.

“You’d witnessed it, you still bore the scars: a five-digit number, underlined by a downward-pointing triangle, tattooed on the outside of your left arm, 10 centimetres from the elbow joint. The blue-black number was quite small, but each stroke that made it was a cut containing unspeakable offences.”

Elsa was a survivor of the Holocaust. She had been interned at the Birkenau concentration camp in Auschwitz and had survived its horror. Suddenly, as if in a heartbeat, you understand (although who can truly understand the terror of having survived such inhumanity) why Elsa seems preoccupied and almost, cold.

As I read the first few pages of the book, I was looking at Felstein as if he were a child, my heart reaching out to him, wanting him to feel safe and loved. His childhood is shaken up when a family “discussion” reveals to him, just how much more distant his mother will now be.

“I still see the four of us around the table in the family living room: the two of us, your mother and your stepfather. The latter began to ask me, jokingly, in your presence, what I would think if you remarried. You were silent, and showed little enthusiasm. It was so sad; like a scene from an Italian comedy. The world was upside down. In short, they were asking my consent for you to remarry and move 10,000 kilometres away from me.”

For a child, this was the worst kind of disaster – up until now Jean-Jacques at least had had a chance to be with his mother, even if she wasn’t exactly the kind of mother he craved for. Now Elsa would be on the other side of the world in America, leaving Jean-Jacques even more bereft than before.

“Forgive me for telling you so bluntly, you who suffered both, but the explosion of our family was as intense for me as the Nazi massacres. In the childish universe of which I was the uncertain centre, you and my father formed the retaining arc. It still wavered, the three of us weren’t very strong, and your separation destroyed the little internal security I had left.”

Perhaps for want of a different life to move forward, or perhaps to leave behind the memories of a torturous past, Elsa made the move to America, remarried, and had a daughter. A few years later she died. Her premature death left Jean-Jacques feeling hollow. He sought his mother in the vacuum left behind – her history was pretty vague and none of her family nor Elsa herself, had ever discussed it openly – for who would want to scratch at a traumatic wound? But after Elsa’s passing, Jean-Jacques finds himself wanting to ask all the questions he didn’t ask of his mother while she was alive.

“I asked myself the question that arguably plagued the lives of all the children of survivors in secret: ‘What did she have to do to survive this?’”

Thus began an investigation and a hunt to uncover who his mother, Elsa Felstein (née Miller) was.

“It’s a way of implementing a fantasy I’ve always had of getting you out of Birkenau, or of trying to replace your ghost, at least, and one that doesn’t have to bother with historical consistency or chronology.”

The answer came to Jean-Jacques through a photograph he found of a group of orchestra players. Through successive revelations from his family, he discovered that Elsa was a violinist in the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz. The Orchestra was formed in 1943 in the Birkenau concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. It was active for 19 months and it consisted of up to 45 young females of Jewish and Slavic descent at one time. They played music to help the SS with the marches of the prisoners and during the daily roll call as well as conducted concerts for the SS on Sundays. This discovery led Jean-Jacques onto a search for other survivors of the orchestra taking him to Germany, Poland, the United States, and Israel, in an attempt to reconstruct his mother’s life.

“Through their experiences, I might come across something about you that escaped me during your lifetime, and from which your death almost cut me off: the echo of your emotions and your pain of this moment in history.”

I was surprised at this discovery. I have read a number of books about World War II and the Holocaust, but I didn’t know about the orchestra’s existence until now. I was now haunted by the kind of questions that Jean–Jacques must have been haunted by – how could anyone play in an orchestra in the midst of such gruesome tragedy unfolding? How could the SS demand something as beautiful as music to play at the same time as the men and women and children were being gassed and cremated?

The book doesn’t always stay in chronological order. There are two parts overlapping each other – one is the investigation that Jean-Jacques undertakes, meeting other women survivors from Birkenau and learning their stories, and the other is the stories themselves which take you back to 1943-1944 in Birkenau.

“There are times when what is logical, chronological and coherent has no place, and this is never truer than when one speaks of Birkenau.”

The overlap of the narratives is almost critical to Jean-Jacque’s hunt for his mother – it goes on to show just the kind of effect Birkenau and Nazism have had on people’s lives and how, even fifty years later, it continues to haunt them. This is why there cannot be a linear narrative. The part about what these survivors had to do to survive the camps and the Nazis is very much what continues to define them.

‘When you’ve been to Auschwitz, you can never leave it completely. When you haven’t been there, you can never truly understand…’

Jean-Jacques understands the sensitive nature of the mission he is on. As much as he would like to find his mother in each survivor’s story, he never makes her the central part of their narratives. He lets each story unfold in its own context. This is why every story makes you cringe, every story makes you want to weep. One such description is of Hélène – newly arrived at the camp who is being made to audition for the orchestra – the absurdity of which hit me hard.

“Hélène had arrived in this place only a few hours earlier. On the ramp, her little brother had been led to what she soon learned was the gas chamber. She’s dressed in rags, helpless, shaved, and branded like a piece of cattle. She expects to die in a short time. A hundred yards behind her, the crematoriums are smoking, with flames coming out of the fireplace. The Nazis are burning her people. This is the end, and she has to make music as if she’s dancing on the corpses. Perhaps for a challenge, in an homage to life, and precisely because it’s in a place where only death has its place, she’ll play what she loves now more than anything.”

Towards the end, after all his interviews and investigations are exhausted, Jean-Jacques undertakes a trip to modern-day Auschqitx, now a tourist center. The author’s exploration through the Birkenau camp comes as a sort of catharsis.

“Although I travelled through Birkenau in my mind when your comrades were telling me their stories, when I finally went there in person it was to verify that you didn’t exist there anymore, and that my story couldn’t start there because nothing could ever start there. I wasn’t born there, and there’s nothing of me in that place at all. I don’t need to lock myself in there on purpose to redeem some sort of error that neither you nor I made.”

Finally, as if reaching some sort of compromise, Jean-Jacques finds himself making peace about what he has learned of his mother, what he has learned of the camp, and how he must now let go.

“In what I can now call my quest to find you, I know very well that I couldn’t help but imagine your life in that place. I followed in your footsteps and looked over your shoulder in my writing, all so that I, too, could escape from Birkenau. And I finally understand that it was possible, helpful, vital even, to do so. You were a woman, and even though you’re no longer here, I found you and accepted you in me, in spite of the fact I’d always denied you were there. I have within me – among other things – both a woman and a death that I must learn to live with. You can rest in peace, and I can finally make you speak, in my own words.”

There were many painful parts to this book. Too many to name in fact. But the most painful one was the letter, in the end, penned by Elsa to her newborn son. It made me weep, hearing at last, how Elsa felt towards her son, and why she decided to keep a part of her life from him.

“My little one, you can’t do anything with these images of death that pass through my mind, the questions that haunt me, and the guilt that undermines me. They’re just acid-like, crystallized evil. There’s nothing good in them that we can share. I don’t want you to have to wade through all this, and I’ll forbid you from doing so for as long as I can.”

Nor was music ever the same for Elsa. She had played to survive at Auschwitz, and now music had been tainted for life. How it must have pained her to write this, to not be able to sing nursery rhymes with her child ever.

“If we started dancing around to nursey rhymes, I’m afraid I’d be dancing on mass graves at the same time.”

The inability of other people to truly grasp her experience kept her from sharing her experiences with others.

“What does my hunger and theirs, my fears and theirs, my fatigue and theirs have in common, apart from the mere sound of those empty words?”

But in the end, what Elsa wanted from her son, and what Jean-Jacques wanted to do for his mother were really the same things – to pull her over to the other side.

“I’ll hold on to what oppresses me, and risk living in that place between you, who represents everything that is real, the only thing I care about in my life, and my visions, my nightmares, and my imagined death. I just hope you’ll be strong enough to pull me over to your side.”

I am surely going to be thinking about The Violinist of Auschwitz for a long time.

The book is expected to release on 30 November 2021. Grab a copy if you can!

I usually enjoy books during this time frame and historical viewpoint, this one was very dry more historical factual..

It covers the author's journey and research. The stories of the survivors are clearly well researched but the presentation is quite dry. If you enjoy the research and process the author takes in documenting the stories and people during this time, you may enjoy this book.
It didn't really work for me but it may be b

Thanks to Netgalley and Pen & Sword

I have read dozens and dozens of books about WWII, both fiction and non-fiction, this one I found somewhat different than the ordinary biography, auto-biography or memoir.
It begins with the author writing/talking to his mother, whom I gather from reading was not a mother that was there for him. She was somewhat distant, preoccupied, not warm nor loving and as I understood it, the author was pretty much raised by other family members. He talks about how these family members put his mother on a pedestal and pretty much worshipped her, this mad him angry and upset, he couldn't see how this cold, distant person he knew was deserving of the adulation they put forth.
His mother, like the biggest part of the survivors from that awful time in our history did not talk about it, did not share, they kept a huge part of themselves hidden, this I understand. I understand it because my father served the duration of the USAs involvement in the war, from northern Africa, through Italy, France, and into Germany when the camps were liberated, and never spoke a word about it once he came home.
This book is about the author's quest to know and understand his mother, years after her death he was still seeking knowledge of her. Through a series of interviews with others that he found were with his mother during this horrific time period he learns what made his mother the person he knew. It is an intimate look at what these women endured and their bravery it has taken to share their stories.
It is a hard book to read, it does skip around but if you take the time it is a really touching story and one everyone needs to hear.
I enjoyed it very much and would recommend to serious students of WWII and the Holocaust, this is a don't miss book for them.
Thank you to Pen and Sword publishing and Net Galley for the free ARC, I am leaving my honest review in return.

The Violinist Of Auschwitz - Jean-Jacques Felstein

I've read a few Auschwitz novels, seven or eight so far, from those that really tug on the heart strings to the drier more historical factual.

This one is at the historical end, but is a lot about the author's journey and research. The stories of the survivors are clearly well researched but the presentation is quite dry.

It didn't really work for me but it may be better suited to historical readers and those who enjoy seeing the journey of the research laid out of the page.

Thanks to Netgalley and Pen & Sword

A truly inspirational book. The stories told are heartbreaking. The author’s writing style is to tell the story like a diary entry and to make you part of it. A great read.

Thank you to #NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

The story told was beautiful and well written. I have read many a book about the Holocaust and this was incredibly touching... Every time I read one I saw, no more but this was an excellent book.

Thank you for the eARC in exchange for an honest review!

Books about World War II catch my attention, I find them so interesting. And I can say that this book taught me a lot. They way jewish people got treated just broke my heart, it‘s insane.

I recommend this book for everyone who‘s interested in World War II

Just finished this remarkable five star read!
Arrested in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz, Elsa survived because she had the 'opportunity' to join the women's orchestra. But Elsa kept her story a secret, even from her own family. Indeed, her son would only discover what had happened to his mother many years later, after gradually unearthing her unbelievable story following her premature death, without ever having revealed her secret to anyone.

Jean-Jacques Felstein was determined to reconstruct Elsa's life in Birkenau, and would go in search of other orchestra survivors in Germany, Belgium, Poland, Israel and the United States. The recollections of Hélène, first violin, Violette, third violin, Anita, a cellist, and other musicians, allowed him to rediscover his 20-year-old mother, lost in the heart of hell.

The story unfolds in two intersecting stages: one, contemporary, is that of the investigation, the other is that of Auschwitz and its unimaginable daily life, as told by the musicians. They describe the recitals on which their very survival depended, the incessant rehearsals, the departure in the mornings for the forced labourers to the rhythm of the instruments, the Sunday concerts, and how Mengele pointed out the pieces in the repertoire he wished to listen to in between 'selections'. Definitely want to read this one!

I have read this book slowly because I found it confusing at times. I was hoping it would feel more like reading a novel than it actually does. The book is interesting, yet the accounts of how Jewish people were treated are disturbing and heartbreaking. My heart goes out to the people who lived through such a sad era in history. Thanks to author Jean-Jacques Felstein, publisher Pen & Sword History, and NetGalley for providing a copy of this book for an honest review.