Captured by the Nazis, she was sent to Auschwitz, and later, Bergen-Belsen. With unnerving clarity and an astonishing ability to find humor where only despair should prevail, the author charts her eleven months as one of "the orchestra girls"; writes of the loves, the laughter, hatreds, jealousies, and tensions that racked this privileged group whose only hope of survival was to make music.

    Neither despairing nor conventionally hopeful, The Survivor describes the most terrible events in human memory. But what emerges finally is an image of man stubbornly equal to the worst that can happen.