Playing for Time (English and French Edition)

One of the few survivors of the women's orchestra in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination complex recalls her experiences, those of her fellow musicians, and the ironies and degradations of camp life

In 1943, Fania Fenelon was a Paris cabaret singer, a secret member of the Resistance, and a Jew. Captured by the Nazis, she was sent to Auschwitz, and later, Bergen-Belsen. With unnerving clarity and an astonishing ability to find humor where only despair should prevail, the author charts her eleven months as one of "the orchestra girls"; writes of the loves, the laughter, hatreds, jealousies, and tensions that racked this privileged group whose only hope of survival was to make music.