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Forty women escaped extermination at Poland's most notorious death camp by playing in a bizarre orchestra that entertained the Nazis and calmed prisoners on their way to the crematoriums. Eleven surviving players are interviewed in this compelling 102-minute documentary that inspired the Emmy-winning television drama
Playing for Time, starring Vanessa Redgrave. There is French vocalist, Violette, who describes the privileges of being an orchestra member: larger portions of bread, daily showers versus monthly-- and the possibility of avoiding execution. Or there's Greek Yvette, relocated to the United States, who saw her own parents marched to the ovens as she played piano. Some of the women choose to focus on the music, others on their personal accounts of atrocity. Director Michel Daeron takes care to show each in their current homes and environments, supplementing with old photos. Most devastating are the film's final 22 minutes in which former orchestra members Helena and Zocha walk the fields of the camp, passing the still-standing buildings and finding the ruins of their old barracks. It is there, in the place where it happened, that the women's tales of powerlessness--of playing music while children were taken from their mothers' arms and sent to certain death--are most resonant.
--Kimberly Heinrichs
