Holocaust and genocide memoirs often focus upon the deliberate effort of the perpetrators to make their victims into something less than human. Fania Fénelon graphically describes the latrine at the Auschwitz concentration camp, a huge, funnel-shaped pit in the ground, forty feet deep and “ringed with wooden bars.” The prisoners are treated like animals. But the inmates of the camp, understandably, see their warders in terms that are a reflection of this same attempt to force people into a non-human status. The SS men are robotic, and Fénelon describes the face of one as something “between animal and mineral.” The irony of the atrocity of mass extermination is that an advanced technology—involving the organization and efficiency in which the killing is accomplished—is being placed in the service of the most brutal, primitive intentions.

A unique aspect of Fania Fénelon’s book, in comparison to similar Holocaust memoirs such as those of Elie Wiesel, Ruth Kluger, and Primo Levi, is the centerpiece, so to speak, of the author’s narrative: the orchestra for which she is recruited to play at Auschwitz. How anyone, including the Nazis, could consider having music played in these circumstances is a mystery. This juxtaposition is a kind of microcosm of the entire Holocaust phenomenon, given the artistic tendencies of the German people as a whole and the centrality of music in their historical and cultural development. One would have thought that a country such as Germany was the last place that such an enormous atrocity could occur. Why is it, people have asked again and again, that a nation that created the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, as well as some of the greatest literary, philosophical, and scientific achievements of the Western world, plunged that world into a virtual Stone Age in the twentieth century?

Though Fania Fénelon was a singer and pianist, her “recruitment” for the orchestra at first proves to be overwhelming. She is told to do scoring—the arrangement of music for a multi-instrument ensemble. This is something she has never done before, but she manages it, despite finding the music itself “detestable”:

I analyzed the piano version with all the care and interest I would have devoted to a piece by Prokofiev, and above all with the same anxiety: I had never done any orchestral scoring before.

In itself this could be considered a minor responsibility, but under the circumstances it is a challenge. This illustrates that under conditions of life and death, people find ways of surviving, of doing whatever is needed to keep themselves going for another day. Another more extreme instance of survival is when Fénelon describes washing in, and actually drinking, her own urine:

A trick I’d found to cool myself was to wash in my urine. Keeping myself clean was essential to me, and there is nothing unclean about urine. I could drink it if I was thirsty, and had done so.

It is not surprising that in a concentration camp people are willing to do things from which they would turn away in revulsion in ordinary daily living.