Playing for Time is Fania Fenelon's story of her ten months in the
women's orchestra at Birkenau, the Auschwitz extermination camp,
where, like a musical Scheherazade ("My Fairy-Tale Reprieve"?), she
sang and scored music to - in every sense - keep the wobbly group
alive. Their function: to pipe their fellow-prisoners off to work
in the morning and home at night, and to entertain the SS: after
each "selection" of inmates for the ovens, German officers withdrew
to the music block to hear sentimental tunes. (Favorite of
Lagerfuhrerein Mandel, the orchestra's sponsor, was Madame
Butterfly.) The situation calls for a Cynthia Ozick but here it's
played for pathos like one of those movies-they-don't-make-anymore.
As the curtains part, our heroine, French-Jewish Fania, is down
with typhus and breathing her last ("Don't die, my little singer,"
intones the SS man) but she rises at the arrival of British troops
to sing the "MarseillAise" and - for the BBC - "God Save the King"
and, by gospodin, the "Internationale." Before deportation, this
multilingual prodigy - talented singer, accomplished pianist,
sensitive and resourceful orchestrator - performed in Paris
nightclubs for German occupation troops. To the extent that one
wants to credit her story, it's the familiar one of degradation,
depravity, and eventual madness among the internees; of the few who
boldly defy the SS - though to no purpose, usually, but to salve
their pride; of orchestra leader Alma Rose, daughter of the Berlin
Opera orchestra's concertmaster, niece of Gustav Mahler, whose
greatest moment - as a German (Jew) and a musician - is playing for
Heinrich Himmler. Yes, irony piles upon irony, but with such
crushing banality and ersatz introspection as to turn even the
moral issues into pulp. (Kirkus Reviews)
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.
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