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The existence of a camp orchestra had a strictly practical dimension: it played military marching music, which was assumed to make the prisoner Kommandos march to and from work more efficiently.
An excerpt from Stanisław Tomaszewski’s report:
… Lined up in fives, hassled by dogs, pushed and shoved, we were marched up to the camp gate. The camp was still asleep. We stand and wait, no one is allowed to sit. […] I read the inscription on the camp gate, ‘Arbeit macht frei‘, once, twice, for the tenth time, and alternately the thought, how to get away from here. The gong is struck, the wake-up call for the camp. …
I can’t believe my ears: an orchestra is playing a marching melody.
In front of the gate, next to which we had been standing for a few hours, an SS unit approaches, armed with submachine guns, ready to shoot, some with dogs. The gate opens and I see my future fellows-in-suffering. A terrible sight. Emaciated human figures, skeletons dressed in striped uniforms, most of them wearing wooden clogs, shaven heads, caps removed, hands pressed against the thighs, a bowl or a cup fastened by a piece of string. Some of the faces are bruised, and swollen, I notice some are limping, they can’t keep up the pace of the march. Prisoner functionaries run up and beat them with whatever is at hand, a stick or a bare fist. Some of the prisoners stagger, they’re unable to go on. Standing at the gate, the camp commandant orders them to be removed from the column and stand between the barbed wire fences. They are no longer fit for work, their fate is sealed, they’ll get spiked with phenol or petrol, or the prisoner functionaries will beat them to death on the way back to the block. They’ll go to the Himmelkommando (to heaven); their fate is certain death. Column after column marched on, several thousand people, and the orchestra kept playing …’
Source: Stanisław Tomaszewski, ASMA-B, Zespół Oświadczenia [Testimonies], vol. 117