Playing for Time

Female prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp (Auschwitz) are spared from death in return for performing music for their captors.

Directors:

Daniel Mann, Joseph Sargent (uncredited)

Writers:

Arthur Miller, Fania Fénelon (autobiography: "The Musicians of Auschwitz")

Stars:

Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Alexander, Maud Adams

Storyline

In World War II, the Jewish French musician and cabaret singer Fania Fenelon Goldstein is sent by the Nazis from Paris to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The guards take her clothing and luggage and they cut her hair very short. one day, when she is very weak, she hears someone asking whether any prisoner could sing Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly and she joins the group of musicians that have been spared from the gas chambers to entertain the Nazis performing music for them. She convinces the conductor Alma Rose to invite her friend Marianne, telling that she would be a talented singer. Along the years of abusive treatment, they survive but losing their dignity.

User Reviews

 

My comments once again stirred deep emotions for these people

28 June 2002 | by pipic8 (United States) – See all my reviews

one of the most haunting,soul-wrenching dramas I have ever seen, made much more so because it actually happened! The cruelty & unfeeling actions portrayed by the German officers gave me the feeling that I wanted to scream! It was so gut-wrenching. It is a movie we all should see lest we forget the reign of terror inflicted by the horror's of war.