Fania Fénelon

Fania Fénelon (née Fanja Goldstein; 2 September 1908 – 19 December 1983) to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. Her father, Jules Goldstein, was an engineer in the rubber industry. She had two brothers, Leonide and Michel Goldstein, both of whom also survived the war. Her marriage to Silvio Perla (a Swiss athlete, specialist in the 5000-metre run) ended in divorce, which was finalized after the war. where she was a pianist and soprano in the Women's 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.)

All of the orchestra members survived the war, except two players, Lola Kroner and Julie Stroumsa, and conductor Alma Rosé who died of a sudden illness, possibly food poisoning, at the camp. Most of the other survivors, particularly Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and Violette Jacquet-Silberstein, disagreed with Fénelon's negative portrayal of Rosé, who, although Jewish, had been given the equivalent status of a kapo. The book was translated into German and English in slightly abridged editions.

Death Fania Fénelon died on 19 December 1983, aged 75, in a Paris hospital. The causes of death were listed as cancer and heart disease.

In popular culture 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 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".

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