Music composed by Auschwitz prisoners during the Holocaust will finally see the light of day next week.
“Orchestras of Auschwitz” will feature four of the more than 200 pieces discovered in 2015 by conductor-composer Leo Geyer when he visited the Polish death camp that year, following the death of British historian and Holocaust expert Martin Gilbert, CNN reports.
“There were, at one point, as many as six orchestras at Auschwitz and they were all very much sanctioned by the SS and in some cases commissioned by the SS,” explained Geyer, noting that prisoner orchestras existed at a majority of the camps.
They were generally small and featured “a bizarre hodgepodge of instruments,” based on what was available to the prisoners. Orchestra staples like woodwinds were not present, while instruments that would rarely be seen in orchestras, such as accordions and saxophones, were frequently featured in the camps’ orchestras.