Gerta (Richter) Rausch

The novel’s teenage heroine grew up as Gerta Richter in Köhn, then Würzburg, with her father and stepmother. They filled her life with music, comfort, and love, and trained her to be an opera singer. She is homeschooled and never left the house, unaware of the true reason why. When she and her father are taken by the Nazis during the war and sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp, she learns that she and her father are Jewish and that their real name is Rausch.

She works in a clothing store at Theresienstadt while her father plays in the camp orchestra, and after they are transferred to Auschwitz and he is killed in the gas chambers, she plays his viola in the Women’s Orchestra. She is eventually transferred to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she remains until the war ends. After several years of...