Alma Rose: Vienna to Auschwitz (review)

Alma Rosé: Vienna to Auschwitz. By Richard Newman with Karen Kirtley. Portland, Ore.: Amadeus Press, 2000. [407 p. ISBN 1-57467-051-4. $29.95.]

Richard Newman's account of the life of Alma Rosé takes the reader on a journey from the musical and cultural world of fin de siècle Vienna to the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps. In his well-written and thoroughly researched book, Newman provides a dramatic and intimate look at Rosé's life, her environment, and the precarious times in which she lived.

Alma Rosé was born in 1906 to Justine Mahler (Gustav Mahler's younger sister) and Arnold Rosé, the revered Viennese violinist who served as the concertmaster of the Vienna Opera and Vienna Philharmonic and as leader of the Rosé Quartet. Music was an integral part of the Rosé household, and Alma developed into a skilled violinist. Professionally, she struggled to emerge from her father's shadow and establish herself as a soloist in the 1920s. In 1932, she founded the Wiener Walzermädeln (Vienna Waltzing Girls), forging a highly successful career as the group's dedicated leader. This ensemble, which toured extensively in Europe, created a unique niche in the musical world and made a name for the young violinist.

Following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, Rosé and her father escaped persecution by fleeing to England. In 1939, to support her beloved father, she went to the Netherlands to work. Unable to leave Holland after the German occupation in May 1940, she attempted unsuccessfully to escape through France and was deported to Auschwitz in July 1943. She saved many young women from the gas chambers through her leadership of the all-women's orchestra in Birkenau. (This portion of her life was told in the 1980 television film Playing for Time.) Succumbing to a sudden illness, she died in April 1944.

Newman reveals that Rosé was a deeply complex individual who was always anchored and driven by her love of music and her family. Through his extensive interviews with friends and acquaintances and his access to the family papers--the book includes a number of family photographs--the author has provided a very personal, often intimate, account of Rosé's life. He chronicles her career as well as her disappointments in love and marriage and considers how those experiences may have shaped her. While clearly sympathetic to his subject, Newman is not afraid to show the darker side of her character, including her sometimes spoiled behavior even while in hiding from the Nazis. Conversely, he also details her strong will and ingenuity, evident while she endured the restrictive life for Jews in occupied Holland and forged her unusual position in Auschwitz. The portrait of Rosé develops slowly, because Newman chooses to spend several chapters recounting the careers and family history of the Rosés and Mahlers. While this creates a valuable historical and personal context, Alma herself does not come into sharp focus until midway through the book. Newman contributes to this problem by returning periodically to the lives of Arnold and Alfred Rosé--the latter was Alma's brother--or those of Alma's friends and protectors, detracting from the power of her own story.

This biography stretches beyond the tale of one woman in another way, however, offering a fascinating look into a variety of cultural milieus in the first part of the twentieth century. Newman investigates the world of the fin de siècle Viennese musical and literary elite, the unusual status of the Waltzing Girls, the bizarre environment of the clandestine huisconcerten (house concerts) in occupied Holland, and, finally, daily life in the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps. With each new situation, Newman never loses sight of the fact that Rosé traveled through these worlds as one of the privileged elite, yet her reactions and experiences often mirror those of her contemporaries. While trapped in Holland from 1940 to 1943, for example, she played in numerous house concerts and interacted with dozens of...