Deft ... Sebba’s achievement here is to synthesise a large amount of existing material to produce a vivid account of the experiences of the 40 or so women who briefly came together to make the music that saved their lives ... Running through this fine book is Sebba’s empathy for the impossible moral choices presented to these young women.
An emphasis more on comprehensiveness than readability. One challenge is the sheer number of people that pass through its pages. They offer a mosaic of recollections that sometimes make the loosely chronological narrative hard to follow ... Sebba sees the musicians, forced into complicity with their oppressors, as denizens of Primo Levi’s morally ambiguous 'grey zone.' And she understands that the subject of music in Nazi concentration camps...is a vexed one.
Impressive ... Sebba’s command of detail is superb. She quite rightly outlines the atrocities of the sadists, psychopaths and savages whom Auschwitz seemed to attract like a magnet; but also the resilience and courage of a group of women who refused to be beaten by evil, and used music to save their lives.
Sebba’s rendering of the musicians’ horrific situation is judicious. She approaches her subject with the sobriety it deserves and rarely indulges in cliché. Yet for all her restraint and good intent, her book propagates a frustrating distortion of the history ... Her focus on the orchestra obscures a rich, permeating, and far more varied history of music during this time ... At times, her book can fall into the trap of seeing music as inherently uplifting. Many of her chapter titles, for example...are tonally at odds with what the research in the book says ... Focusing on uplift, framing music as miraculous...flattens a multidimensional story that is far more interesting in all its complexity, contradiction, and variety.