Thursday, August 18, 2016

Playing for Time






Fania Fenelon Dead at 75



PARIS (Dec. 22)
Fania Fenelon, the musician who survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and later told the world of having to play in the women’s orchestra there while millions went to their death, during the Holocaust, died of cancer Monday at the age of 75. Her sister-in-law, Madeleine Goldstein, said there would be no funeral because Fenelon donated her body to medical research.
Her book, “Playing for Time,” in which she recounted how the orchestra, conducted by Alma Rose, a niece of Gustav Mahler, gave concerts in 1944 under orders of the SS, was translated into a dozen languages and was also made into a television film in which she was portrayed by British actress Vanessa Redgrave, a militant supporter of the PLO.
Fenelon, an ardent Zionist, campaigned against the CBS-TV film in protest against the insensitivity in casting Redgrave in it. She told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at the time: “I have nothing against Miss Redgrave’s political opinions but the PLO wants to destroy Israel and the Jewish people and I cannot accept to have this type of person play my life. “Many Jewish organizations in the U.S. also protested casting Redgrave in the role.
Fenelon was born in Paris as Fanny Goldstein. She studied music and after becoming a professional pianist and singer took the professional stage name of Fania Fenelon. She was deported by the Nazis and spent II months playing in Bergen-Belsen.
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The musicians of Auschwitz

Author:Fania Fénelon; Marcelle Routier
Publisher:London : Joseph, 1977.
Edition/Format:  Print book : Biography : EnglishView all editions and formats
Database:WorldCat
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Playing for time

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Playing for time

Author:Daniel Mann; Linda Yellen; Arthur Miller; Vanessa Redgrave; Jane Alexander; All authors
Publisher:[Saint Charles, Ill.] : Olive Films, [2013]
Edition/Format:  DVD video : NTSC color broadcast system : EnglishView all editions and formats
Database:WorldCat
Summary:
Fania Fenelon is a Jewish cabaret singer in Paris during the Nazi invasion. Fania and thousands of other Jewish and political prisoners are sent to the Auschwitz death camp. She and a group of other classical musicians are spared from death in exchange for performing music for their captors. They are also ordered to play for the thousands being herded to the gas chambers, a 'humane' means of easing the condemned into the next world.  Read less
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Playing for time

Author:Fania Fénelon; Marcelle Routier; Mazal Holocaust Collection.
Publisher:New York : Atheneum, 1977, ©1976.
Edition/Format:  Print book : Biography : English : 1st edView all editions and formats
Database:WorldCat
Summary:
Contains primary source material.
An extraordinary, personal account of the women's orchestra in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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Cast[edit]





Reception[edit]

Lewis, Anthony. “Abroad at Home: After Auschwitz.” The New York Times, October 2, 1980, p. A23.

Plot[edit]

Fénelon, a Jewish singer-pianist, is sent with other prisoners to the Auschwitz concentration camp in a crowded train during World War II. After having their belongings and clothes taken and their heads shaved, the prisoners are processed and enter the camp. Fénelon is recognized as being a famous musician and she finds that she will be able to avoid hard manual labor and survive longer by becoming a member of the prison's female orchestra,Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz.
In the process, she strikes up a close relationship with Alma Rosé, the musical group's leader, as well as the other members of the band. Realizing that the musicians get better treatment than other prisoners, Fania convinces the guards and members of the orchestra that another prisoner she had befriended, Marianne, is actually a talented singer. Although Marianne performs poorly at her audition, she is allowed to join the orchestra. Playing for the Nazis, however, robs the women of much of their dignity and most of them often questioned whether remaining alive was worth the abuse they constantly suffer.


Fania Fénelon tells her story of terror and survival at Auschwitz in Playing for Time. In German-occupied Paris, she had been a nightclub singer, well trained in both classical and popular music. The Nazis arrested her for aiding the French Resistance in 1943. Once they found out that her father, Jules Goldstein, was a Jew, they shipped her to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the combination work camp and death factory in occupied Poland. She survived the journey and the initial selection of deportees for the gas chambers, along with her friend Clara, and was recognized at the camp as a well-known musician. She had little choice but to audition by singing arias fromMadam Butterfly, and she was assigned to the orchestra.
The Auschwitz women’s orchestra was made up of some forty inmates. Within the camp, they had a special position, with adequate clothing, shelter, and toilet privileges. Yet their food was the same as that of the regular prisoners, and they were subject to the same arbitrary roll calls, beatings, and abuse. They knew that if they did not please their Schutzstaffel (SS) masters, they might at any time be “selected” for extermination. To preserve their lofty position, the “orchestra girls” had to play march music for the work gangs as they trudged to and from their barracks, “welcome” tunes as new trainloads of prisoners arrived, and various concerts for the diversion of the SS officers who ran the camp. The prisoners in the orchestra had their own hierarchy. The concert violinist, Alma Rosé, was at the top as kapo, a combination camp police officer and conductor. Just below her was the tough and humorless Tchaikowska as blockowa, or barracks’ warden. Within this madness, Fénelon tried to provide some musical leadership and human kindness to those around her.
In early 1945, the orchestra was dissolved. Fénelon and some of the other Jewish members were transported in an open boxcar to Bergen-Belsen, in north-central Germany. Conditions were far worse there, with virtually no regular food, water, or shelter from the cold winter rains. She contracted typhus and was near death when the camp was liberated by British troops in April, 1945. She was again recognized, and she mustered enough energy to sing the “Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, for the British radio reporters accompanying the liberators.
Fénelon’s narrative of her year and a half in Nazi captivity skillfully combines stories of terror, tenderness, brutality, and courage. The German SS officers who ran the camp are rightfully denounced as brutes and murderers. Joseph Kramer, the commandant, is portrayed as a stupid butcher who liked to relax with a bit of musical entertainment to forget the “difficult tasks” that he faced running a death camp. Frau Maria Mandel, the chief of the women’s camp, was even worse. Fénelon describes her as a beautiful woman, capable of appreciating fine music, but one who coldly and fanatically dedicated herself to the exploitation and extermination of the “inferiors” under her control.At one point, she “rescued” a toddler from a trip to the gas chambers, dressed him up and played with him as if he were a doll for a few days, and then gave him back to the machinery of death in the next selection.

Biography[edit]

Fanja Goldstein was born in Paris in 1908[1][2] to Jules Goldstein, an engineer in the rubber industry, and Maria Davidovna Bernstein; both of her parents were from the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. She attended the Conservatoire de Paris, where she studied under Germaine Martinelli, obtaining a first prize in piano (despite her diminutive size and very small hands) and at the same time worked nights, singing in bars. She had two brothers, Leonide and Michel Goldstein. Her marriage to Silvio Perla (a Swiss athlete, specialist in the 5000 m) ended in divorce, which was finalized after the war.[3]
During the Second World War, she supported the French Resistance against the Nazis until her arrest and deportation toAuschwitz-Birkenau,[4] where she was a member of the girl orchestra of Auschwitz, then to Bergen-Belsen, until she was freed in 1945. Suffering from a potentially fatal case of typhus and weighing only 65 pounds, she sang for the BBC on the day of her liberation by British troops. (A Library of Congress entry for this recording gives her name as Fanja Perla, her married name at the time; her divorce from Perla was finalized after the war.)[3]
Under her pseudonym of "Fénelon" (which she took up after the war), Goldstein became a well known cabaret singer. In 1966 she went with her African-American life-partner, baritone singer Aubrey Pankey, to East Berlin. After her partner's death she returned to France. Between 1973-75, with Marcelle Routier, she wrote Sursis pour l'orchestre, a book about her experiences, based on the diary she kept at the concentration camps. It dealt with the degrading compromises survivors had to make, the black humor of inmates who would sometimes laugh hysterically over gruesome sights, the religious and national tensions among inmates (e.g. between the Jewish musicians and anti-Semitic Poles), and the normality of prostitution and lesbian relationships. At Birkenau, Fénelon was one of the two main singers, an occasional arranger of musical pieces, and even a temporary drummer, when the original drummer briefly took ill.[3]

All of the orchestra members survived the war, save for the conductor Alma Rosé, who died of a sudden illness at the camp. Most of the other survivors, particularly Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and Violette Jacquet, disagreed with the Fénelon's book's negative portrayal of Rosé, the orchestra's conductor, who, although Jewish, had been given the equivalent status of akapo. The book was translated into German and English in slightly abridged editions. Fénelon told the press at the time that she was writing another book about her life after the camps, but this never materialized.[citation needed]


Linda Yellen filmed Playing For Time using as script a dramatic adaptation by Arthur Miller. Fénelon bitterly opposed Miller's and Yellen's purportedly sanitized rendition of life in the camps and above all Yellen's casting of Vanessa Redgrave to play her. Redgrave was a well-known PLO sympathizer[5] and, standing close to six feet tall, bore little resemblance to the petite Fania. "I do not accept a person to play me who is the opposite of me ... I wanted Liza Minnelli. She's small, she's full of life, she sings and dances. Vanessa ... doesn't have a sense of humor, and that is the one thing that saved me from death in the camp", Fénelon said. She scolded Redgrave in person during a 60 Minutes interview but the actress garnered the support of the acting community. Fénelon never forgave Redgrave, but eventually softened her view of the production to concede that it was "a fair film".[6]

Playing for Time Bibliography(Critical Edition of Young Adult Fiction)

Sources for Further Study
Associated Press. “Fania Fénelon: Survived Auschwitz by Playing in Women’s Orchestra.” Boston Globe, December 22, 1983. p. 1.
“Fania Fénelon Life Inspired TV Drama.” Toronto Globe and Mail, December 22, 1983, p. E4.
“Fania Fénelon, 74, Memoirs Described Auschwitz Singing.” The New York Times, December 22, 1983, p. B12.
Freedman, Adele. “The Struggle Continues for Auschwitz Chanteuse.”Toronto Globe and Mail, November 8, 1980, p. E7.
Lewis, Anthony. “Abroad at Home: After Auschwitz.” The New York Times, October 2, 1980, p. A23.

Daniel Mann

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other people named Daniel Mann, see Daniel Mann (disambiguation).
Daniel Mann
Daniel Mann.jpg
BornDaniel Chugerman
August 8, 1912
New York City, New York
DiedNovember 21, 1991 (aged 79)
Los Angeles, California
Spouse(s)Mary Kathleen Williams (1948[1] -?; divorced)
Sherry Presnell (divorced)
Daniel Mann, also known as Daniel Chugerman (August 8, 1912 – November 21, 1991), was an American film and television director.
Mann was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Helen and Samuel Chugerman, a lawyer.[1] He was a stage actor since childhood, and attendedErasmus Hall High School, New York's Professional Children's School and theNeighborhood Playhouse.[2] He entered films in 1952 as a director, and is known for his excellent ear for dialogue. Most of Mann's films were adaptations from the stage (Come Back Little Sheba, The Rose Tattoo, The Teahouse of the August Moon) and literature (BUtterfield 8, The Last Angry Man).
Mann died of heart failure in Los Angeles, California, in November 1991. He is buried in the Jewish Cemetery Hillside Memorial Park. He had three children with his wife, actress Mary Kathleen Williams;[citation needed] His daughter, Erica Mann, is the widow of director Harold Ramis.[3][4]

Filmography as director[edit]
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