In 1961, sixteen years after Eric Vogel leaped from a transport train headed toward the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, he recounted his escape for Downbeat, an American jazz magazine: “This is a story of horror, terror, and death but also of joy and pleasure, the history of a jazz band whose members were doomed to die.” English wasn’t Vogel’s first language—he was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1896—but it’s hard to imagine a more gripping opening line. Downbeat ran his story in three parts, each with the title “Jazz in a Nazi Concentration Camp.”

While Vogel was imprisoned by the Nazis—first in the so-called model camp, Theresienstadt, and then later at the Auschwitz death camp—he and a dozen or so others played in a jazz band called the Ghetto Swingers. There were similar groups at many camps throughout Nazi-controlled Europe: musicians who were forced to perform, on command and under inconceivable duress, for the S.S. The particular cruelty of this—desecrating and corrupting the creative impulse that fuels and sustains art—remains wildly perverse, though Vogel was nonetheless grateful for any chance, however grim, to make the music that he loved.

The Nazis officially condemned jazz as “jungle music,” identifying it with blacks and Jews, but a hunger for it remained, both in the camps and elsewhere in Europe. A widely distributed Nazi poster denouncing entartete (or “decadent”) music featured a man with exaggerated features playing a saxophone and wearing a top hat, tails, and a six-pointed gold star. The journalist Mike Zwerin, a trombonist from Queens who covered jazz for the International Herald Tribune, later wrote about the Luftwaffe officer Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, who published a secret newsletter about jazz in occupied Europe, using the pen name Dr. Jazz. “If anybody who loved jazz could not be a Nazi, there seem to have been quite a few close calls,” Zwerin noted. For a while, jazz kept Vogel useful to the Nazis—and therefore alive. According to Vogel, the Ghetto Swingers did very good arrangements of George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” (“I got rhythm / I got music / I got my man / who could ask for anything more?”) and, incredibly, Georges Boulanger’s “Avant de Mourir,” or “Before Dying.”

Still, by the time an emaciated Vogel jumped from the train, in 1945—evading machine-gun fire, lunging toward a dark forest, his bones surely rattling against one another—many of his bandmates had been murdered. Vogel, who played trumpet, the pianist Martin Roman, and the guitarist Coco Schumann were the only survivors. “Being a member of The Ghetto Swingers was an iffy business,” Schumann wrote later. “It did not guarantee survival.”

When I first heard about the Ghetto Swingers, I had a difficult time processing the story. I’d received a letter from a man named Todd Allen, of Chatham, New Jersey; he had read a story I’d written about the lost Yiddish folk songs of the Second World War, and knew I had an ongoing interest in obscure musical artifacts. Allen had recently discovered a few boxes of Vogel’s things, languishing in a closet in Las Vegas. Felicita Danola, his wife’s grandmother, had been hired in Vogel’s old age as his live-in caretaker. When Vogel died, in 1980, Danola acquired some of his belongings. Vogel had thought to organize them, and Danola had thought to keep them, but the material had gone untouched for several decades. Allen had it now. Did I want to come see it? There were photos, letters, magazine articles. The improbability of the entire enterprise—musicians creating art under the most odious and debilitating conditions imaginable—made the fact of the Ghetto Swingers seem miraculous to me, if not incomprehensible. I went to New Jersey.

Allen and his wife, Ruth, received me warmly, and, over the next several months, they helped me piece together Vogel’s story. Vogel was an amateur musician, perhaps more of an aficionado than a savant. He was stout—before the war, he was about two hundred and ten pounds—and round-faced, with big, kind eyes. His eyebrows were pleasingly thick and arched into two little peaks. Vogel was the type of guy who could I.D. a horn solo mere seconds after the stylus hit the record, a serious and devoted student of the form, an instinctive critic. He was not above some light boasting about his record collection, which he described as “one of the largest collections of American jazz records in my country.”

On March 15, 1939—the same day that the Czech President, Emil Hácha, granted free passage to German soldiers, after Hitler had threatened to bomb Prague—the Gestapo pounded on the door of the apartment that Vogel shared with his parents, in Brno. The officer recognized Vogel from a jam session that they’d both attended a few weeks back. How odd that confrontation must have felt—meeting again under once unthinkable circumstances. The officer assured Vogel that he would be safe. “This was the first time that jazz was deeply involved in shaping my life. It was not to be the last,” Vogel wrote.

After the German occupation, Vogel lost his job. He was required to wear a yellow Star of David and forbidden to be outside after 8 P.M. His family now shared their two-bedroom apartment with two other Jewish families. Vogel clung to jazz as a sort of life preserver. “I still managed to play somewhat muted jazz in my apartment,” he writes, “and was in demand by bandleaders to write more arrangements.” Eventually, his short-wave radio was confiscated by the Gestapo. The Gestapo also took his trumpet, though he soaked the valves in sulfuric acid before surrendering it, “to prevent anyone from playing military marches on the horn used to playing jazz.” Vogel took a job with the local Jewish council, and was ordered to help organize umschulungskurse, or “retraining” courses. In theory, these were supposed to teach people practical skills that would allow them to emigrate, but Vogel was asked to lead a course on jazz. He had about forty applicants, and turned them into a band: the Kille Dillers. “I had found in one Down Beat an expression, ‘killer diller,’ that I liked very much, though I didn’t know the exact meaning of the words,” Vogel wrote. (A bit of lost mid-century American slang, “killer diller” refers, in a general way, to something sensational, though jazz musicians of the big-band era used it specifically to refer to a musician who could really play; Vogel also noted that “Kille” sounded a bit like the Hebrew word “kehilah,” or congregation.)

The Kille Dillers, in 1940. Vogel stands in the center, holding his trumpet in his left hand.

The Kille Dillers fell apart as the transport orders started coming in. Vogel’s notice arrived on March 25, 1942. He was sent west to Theresienstadt, a transit camp and sorting station in Terezín, a fortress town in the Nazi-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Theresienstadt had been picked, he wrote, “to be shown to a commission of the International Red Cross as proof that everything written in the enemy press about concentration camps, with gas chambers, forced labor, and killing, was a lie.” In January of 1943, Vogel wrote to the camp’s department of leisure activities to see about establishing a jazz orchestra; he was given permission to assemble it. A band shell was erected in the main square, and a coffee house opened. The Ghetto Swingers were forced to play there “every day for many hours,” Vogel recalled. “It was set up as a so-called paradise camp—a showcase for propaganda purposes,” Bret Werb, an ethnomusicologist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C., told me. “A lot of extraordinary things happened there. Many talented people who were sent there were allowed to exercise their artistic bents.”