The author and historian behind The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz talks life, home, family and more …
Anne Sebba is a historian and award-winning biographer who began her career as a Reuters correspondent based in London and Rome. She has written eleven works of non-fiction, mostly about iconic 20th century women. She is the author of the international bestseller That Woman, a biography of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, and the prize-winning Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died Under Nazi Occupation. She lives in London.
ON HOME I have lived in the same place for the last 45 years – Richmond, in south west London. I feel that’s terribly boring. In the first five years of married life, we lived in five different places, including New York. When I was 21, I lived in Rome for my first job. You can create home anywhere but for me it’s where my family is.
ON FAMILY I’m the second of two sisters. I was quite a swot and a nerdy child, and my parents encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to be a writer from the age of eight and they bought me a toy typewriter.
ON ROOTS My father is very much the starter motor of this latest book. He ended up in Belsen as a tank driver. When I realised he was in charge of these Displaced Persons, I realised he was there when the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz were there and they must have crossed paths.
ON WRITING We built into the side return of our Victorian house about eight years ago and the idea was that my husband would work on one end of the room and I’d work on the other, but he promptly had a heart attack and died, so I’ve moved into this big space. I write non-fiction and I started at Reuters, so I have a very precise method. I like to do all the research before I write. I have an absolute rule that it’s a minimum of a thousand words a day, because if you do a thousand words a day, in a week you’ve got seven thousand words. I love having these targets and that’s probably a discipline Reuters instilled in me.
ON MY DESK I’ve had the same writing desk for years and years, and it’s terribly messy. For every book I write, I like a little practical piece of the person I’m writing about. For Wallis Simpson I’ve got a signature of hers, for Jennie Churchill I’ve got a picture of her husband Randolph. The most precious one is a bit of white rock from Sing Sing prison in New York where Ethel Rosenberg was incarcerated for three years. I wrote that book in lockdown, newly widowed and I kept holding this piece of white rock.
ON SUCCESS I don’t really think of success. Success is leaving the world a better place than you found it. You don’t have to be the best. Reuters sacked me when I was pregnant because they thought you couldn’t be a foreign correspondent and a mother, so I really thought that was the end of everything. I was 26. But actually that was the making of my book-writing career. Although I didn’t run a bureau and didn’t become an anchor, given that I’ve had three children and written eleven books, I’ve had a wonderful life and I’ve met all sorts of people. I suppose the moment I’m proudest of is discovering the 15 letters between Wallis Simpson and her husband Ernest because that was biographical gold dust, and it changed the picture. There have been dozens of books since but it was mine that changed the view of Wallis.
ON BOOKSHOPS My local independent bookshop is The Open Book in Richmond but I am passionate about libraries. Support your library because it’s such a gift to grow up holding books and feeling books and knowing you can exchange them regularly. Cherish books because if you don’t, they won’t exist.
The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, €26.25) is out now.
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