In 1943, Fania Fenelon, a cabaret singer in Paris who worked for the Resistance, was arrested and taken to Auschwitz–Birkenau. Her life was saved when she was enrolled in an orchestra whose job was in part to entertain the camp personnel and in part to provide the background music to genocide. She and her fellow musicians played as prisoners marched off to work or filed towards the gas chambers. They had to suffer not only the rigours of the camp but also the contempt of some of their fellow prisoners as they survived while others did not. But survival carries its own weight and its own obligations. Fania Fenelon rebuilt her life but eventually felt the need to bear witness to those events in wartime Europe and in 1977, over thirty years later, published her account of this time.

This was the book that Arthur Miller was asked to dramatise for a television film that was to star Vanessa Redgrave. In some ways he had the advantage of showing aspects of what Fenelon could only describe, but in place of testimony he could only offer drama, impersonation, a semblance of the real. For the authenticity of the first person, in the film version he could only present the seeming authenticity of setting and a simulation of emotions once felt on the pulse.