Playing for Time

Playing for Time (1980) is an American TV movie you can watch online on iFILM, with a screenplay by Arthur Miller drawn from the memoir of Fania Fénelon — a half-Jewish French cabaret singer deported to Auschwitz in 1944.

At the camp, Fénelon is selected for the women's prisoner orchestra, the only ensemble of its kind in the death camp network. Its conductor is Alma Rosé — niece of Gustav Mahler, daughter of Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster Arnold Rosé — who pulls a professional level of playing out of terrified inmates because she understands that a bad performance could kill them all. The musicians sleep in a separate barracks, eat better than the rest, skip the heavy labour details, and every morning play marches for prisoners being led out to work or worse. Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Alexander lead; the film took four Emmy Awards in 1981.

Less melodrama than cold reckoning — this is what it looked like to survive by playing music for people sentenced to die. Stream Playing for Time online on iFILM.