It is night. A young girl and her mother have just been transported to Auschwitz. The wind howls, guards scream, dogs bark, people push and shove. The girl is holding something.

“In my right hand, numb with cold, I still gripped Bach’s beautiful Sarabande from the English Suite,” she would recall years later, “and I looked down and read it to myself because it was somehow essential for me at that moment to keep it in my head.”

Trucks arrive, and the girl is herded into one. Her mother is barred from going with her. Hysterical, the girl lets go of the Bach score, which flies away. But her mother is in motion: “Breaking free from her guards, she rushed forward to rescue my snippet of hope , and shrill voices rang out behind her.”

“Sprinting like a woman half her age,” the girl’s memory continues, “she somehow plucked the score from the air and ran to our truck, offering it up to me inches from the tailgate.”