Before the war, violinist and trumpeter Louis Bannet was a celebrated jazz musician in Holland, often called “the Dutch Louis Armstrong.” Once, before the war, he heard a knock on his dressing room door. “So you’re the Dutch Louis Armstrong?” a deep, raspy voice said. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m the American one.” And just like that, he and Louis Armstrong jammed the night away.
Then everything changed. Arrested and sent to Auschwitz, Louis Bannet faced a chilling ultimatum: Pass an audition for the camp orchestra or die. The two musicians before him had failed—and were immediately sent to the gas chambers.
According to Ken Shuldman’s Jazz Survivor: The Story of Louis Bannet, with frozen hands and unimaginable pressure, Bannet picked up a confiscated trumpet. He had his choice—countless prisoners had brought their instruments with them when they were forced from their homes, only to have them taken upon arrival. These belongings were stored in an area of the camp known as Canada—so named because, like the country, it was seen as a place of riches and abundance. Prisoners assigned to work there had one of the camp’s more bearable jobs, with opportunities to scavenge for food, clothing and valuables. Among the countless items warehoused there, musical instruments were in vast supply.
The sight before him was staggering. One wall displayed an array of gleaming brass and woodwind instruments. Another held the string section—violins, violas and cellos—while a massive double bass leaned against a table scattered with sheet music. Nearby sat a set of drums and several accordions.
Bannet reached for a trumpet, its cold metal biting his fingers. Then, with everything at stake, he played “St. Louis Blues”—a piece he had once performed alongside American jazz saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. This command performance saved his life.
Years later, Edwina Handy, the great-granddaughter of “St. Louis Blues” composer W.C. Handy, learned of Bannet’s story.
“Chills ran down my spine,” she wrote in a letter to Shuldman. “We knew that W. C. Handy’s music was a vehicle of interracial goodwill. We knew that Louis Armstrong and others globalized the music. But we never knew that a song had saved a man’s life from the worst horror of the twentieth century.”
For Bannet, music became both a means of survival and a source of torment. At Auschwitz, he was forced to play daily as a member of the men’s orchestra, often providing the grim soundtrack as prisoners went to and from forced labor, just inside the gates near the infamous “Arbeit macht frei”(“Work makes you free”) sign. Like the false hope that sign represented, music in the camps often served a similarly deceptive purpose.
One of the orchestra’s most chilling tasks was playing as transport trains arrived. This served multiple functions: It gave new arrivals the illusion that all was well, easing their fears with lively, carnival-like melodies rather than music that reflected the grim reality awaiting them. It also facilitated the Nazis’s control over the chaos, calming prisoners just enough to make selection and extermination more efficient. The music drowned out the screams of those being separated from their families, masking the horrors that unfolded just steps away. In much the same way that the gas chambers were designed not only to kill on a mass scale but also to spare the Nazis the emotional burden of their crimes, music played a grotesque role in sanitizing murder.
Worse still for Bannet, he was frequently woken in the middle of the night and ordered to perform for the distraction of “entertainment-starved” Nazi officers. One night, he was taken to a birthday party for none other than Josef Mengele and forced to play cheerful jazz tunes for the very men responsible for the mass murder of his fellow prisoners.
For those like Bannet who were in the orchestras, playing often meant the difference between life and death. Their days were grueling—14-hour shifts providing a surreal soundtrack to suffering. They woke an hour earlier than other prisoners to play as inmates trudged to forced labor. In the evenings, they played again as the exhausted prisoners returned. But their duties went beyond these routines. They were forced to play during executions, adding a chilling accompaniment to brutality. Most horrifying of all, they sometimes played as people were marched to the gas chambers—recognizing familiar faces, even family members, among the doomed.
Their conditions, while marginally better than those of other prisoners, came at an unbearable cost. Though spared from hard labor, they endured psychological torment. Some fellow prisoners resented them, seeing them as unwilling tools of Nazi cruelty. They were spat on, cursed at, shunned. In his memoir Music of another World, Symon Laks, who was the head of the men’s orchestra at Auschwitz, recalled a woman who had begged the musicians to stop: “Enough of this,” she said. “Let us die in peace.”
In The Ghetto Swinger, survivor Coco Schumann, who had been conscripted in the orchestra recounted, “As they walked past us toward the gas chambers, the children looked me directly in the eye. They knew exactly where they were going. These images are burned into my mind. I can blink as much as I want. Sometimes it helps when tears start running down my cheek, but as soon as I open my eyes, the image returns. Something inside of me has been broken forever—something that can never be repaired.”
Of all prisoners, only one group had a higher suicide rate than musicians: those forced to collect bodies from the gas chambers.
Still, for some, music remained a form of salvation. Violinist Shony Braun, a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau, recalled: “When I was about to touch the barbed wire, I would play music in my head—Mendelssohn’s ‘Violin Concerto.’”
Szymon Laks, the conductor of the Auschwitz men’s orchestra, later reflected: “So many times I had been told that one could not survive by music. But I survived because of music.”
Perhaps the most powerful moment in Louis Bannet’s story came when he was tasked with leading a group of Romani musicians in the camp. A young woman in the group asked him, “Why should we play for the people who are going to murder us?” Bannet’s response was profound: “I do not play for them—I play for me.”
After the war, Bannet rebuilt his life in Canada, where he became a beloved television personality. Just weeks after his arrival, Edith Piaf, deeply moved by his story, invited him to perform “La Vie En Rose” with her—a song of survival, of love, of seeing the world in a different light.
“I was stronger than Hitler,” Bannet later said. “I could do whatever I wanted, as long as I had my trumpet in my hand.”
For Further Reading: “Jazz in Nazi Germany: The Music that Wouldn’t Die”