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.
