A Paris cabaret singer, a secret member of the Resistance, and a Jew, Fénelon was captured by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz where she became one of the legendary orchestra girls who used music to survive the Holocaust. This is her personal account of the experience.
"Drawing upon an astonishingly powerful memory and sparing no one, least of all herself, [Fénelon] has written about her daily life as the diva of Auschwitz."—The New York Times Book Review
In 1943, Fania Fénelon 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.
Fania Fénelon was a singer living in Paris. During World War II she smuggled information to the French Resistance before her arrest in 1943 by the Nazis. After the war she resumed her career as an entertainer until her retirement in 1972. In 1983 Fénelon died of cancer in Paris. Her book Playing for Time eventually became a popular television movie and a stageplay.
