Playing for Time
A searing drama of the Holocaust—and the remarkable, moving story of the Auschwitz Women’s Orchestra
Paris, 1942. Fania Fénelon, a popular Jewish nightclub singer, is arrested by the occupying Germans. Sent to Auschwitz in a packed freight-car, shorn of her hair, tattooed with an identifying number, starved, and subjected to harsh labor, she loses all traces of her former self. But her life at the camp changes dramatically when she is drafted into the Women’s Orchestra, a desperate little ensemble that marches the prisoners out to work and gives concerts for the German high brass. Led by Alma Rosé, a sternly ambitious German-Jewish conductor who knows that her job is a matter of life and death, Fania and her…