"If we don't play well, we'll go to the gas"
By Jerusalem Post Staff

(May 1) -- A soon-to-be-released book tells what happened to Gustav Mahler's niece, Alma RosŽ, during the Shoah. Alma's story first came to public attention through the 1980 film Playing for Time To Order...

Art endures despite great adversity. Never was that more true than in the case of Alma RosŽ, daughter of famed violinist Arnold RosŽ, niece of Gustav Mahler, and a musician in her own right. Ardent, inspiring and clearly ahead of her time, she is the subject of a new biography.

Alma Maria RosŽ was born on November 3, 1906 in Vienna to Justine (sister of Gustav Mahler) and Alfred RosŽ, first violinist of the Vienna Philharmonic and Opera Orchestra and leader of the RosŽ Quartet, among Europe's most distinguished chamber music groups. She was named for her godmother and Uncle Gustav's wife, and celebrated by the Mahler's and RosŽs, as well as close family friend "Uncle" Bruno Walter. At age 13, her parents sent Alma to study at the Vienna Conservatory and later the Vienna State Academy in preparation for a musical career.

Alma made her professional debut in Vienna on December 16, 1926, just six weeks after her twentieth birthday. Her father conducted a chamber orchestra composed of musicians from the Philharmonic and stepped down from the podium to play the Bach Double Violin Concerto with his daughter. Pressure was intense and the reviews and audience reaction were lukewarm. Ironically, later in life, during her long stints of hiding and planning to escape the Nazis, Alma's playing was said to have matured and evolved.

Throughout the 1920s, Alma continued to play and tour professionally. In 1930, she married Czech violist V‡-a P-’hoda, though each of them continued to perform on their own schedules. In 1932, Alma struck on a revolutionary idea - to form a women's musical ensemble in the tradition of popular costumed groups which played in local cafŽs. The group, which came to be known as the Vienna Waltzing Girls, featured both instrumentalists and vocalists. It would prove to be good experience for Alma later, during her life in the concentration camp. At the time, it was a good distraction from a crumbling marriage.

Like many other prosperous and assimilated Viennese Jews, the RosŽ family was caught off guard by the rise of Nazism. Alma courageously assisted her family's flight, but was herself caught in the Nazi vise and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

"In August 1943," we learn from Vienna to Auschwitz, as the new kapo of the Music Block - in command of a barrack and an orchestra after less than a month at the camp - Alma joined a select, often despised company of prisoners." It was among these prisoners at Auschwitz that Alma's musical heritage also made her a heroine, for there she led a women's orchestra - the only female musical ensemble in the camps. Taking a group of terrified and often very untrained women, she transformed them into an orchestra whose music saved them from being gassed by their Nazi captors. Some 40 women survived the camps because of their participation. The average age of the ensemble which Alma inherited when she arrived at Auschwitz was nineteen; the youngest musician was fourteen, the oldest about thirty-six. Their youth and inexperience posed enormous difficulties. Still, they survived.

Years later, survivor and orchestra member HŽl�ne Scheps recalled: "Alma saved our lives because she knew how to make an orchestra of us. If Alma hadn't been there, we wouldn't be here... Alma knew music so well and knew so well what each of us was capable of, she could ask this one or that one to play in a certain way to set off a certain passage. It was not difficult for her to hand a trumpet passage to some violins and tell them how to play it."

Though the orchestra women survived, Alma RosŽ, despite her special status - SS Dr. Josef Mengele tried to keep her aliveÊ- died of an illness in the camps before they were liberated.

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