On Thursday the 15th of May, the Spectator is hosting a live book club event.

Sam Leith, the host of this podcast, will be joined by former Telegraph Editor-in-Chief

and military historian Max Hastings.

It will be an opportunity to talk about Max's new book, Sword, D-Day, trial by battle,

as well as mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day.

The full details are as follows,

7.30 on Thursday, 15th of May, at the Shaw Theatre in Houston, London, and tickets start from £27.50, although I believe there are ticket options that include a signed copy of the book.

For those tickets, go to www. Spectator.com.com.com. We look forward to seeing you there.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for

The Spectator. My guest

this week is the historian Anne Seber, whose new book, The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz,

a story of survival tells a meticulously researched and at times deeply traumatizing story

of the women's orchestra that was formed in Auschwitz and played through most of that camp's history during the Second World War.

And I want to start by asking a kind of broad question about the book, which is there is a kind of easy version of this book, or a sentimental version of this book, in which the beauty of music transcends the horrors

of the camps. And what you produced is a bit more complicated than that, isn't it? Can you tell

me how you sort of framed this story? I don't know about how I framed it, but it's certainly

not about the beauty of music, very sadly. I did interview the last

survivor, Anita Lasca Valfish, and it was one of the first things that she said to me, don't think

about the music. The music was ghastly. It's not real music. She said, if I ever have to hear

Schubert's Marsh Militaire again, I don't know what I'd do.

So this was mostly military music and it was played at a fairly basic level. I mean, it is

extraordinary as we come to talk about how the orchestra was brought together with some children who made, and they were children,

...