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Compassionate yet detached, ironic yet pitilessly honest, Szymon Laks, who became kapellmeister of the Auschwitz orchestra, recounts the inconceivable spectacle of SS guards growing teary-eyed at the sound of familiar melodies and in the next moment giving themselves up to the furies of extermination. Music led to the salvation of some; for others it led the way to the gas chambers. That Laks and others were capable of making music at Auschwitz is almost beyond belief. Yet they did so with meager resources and full knowledge of what it would mean if they did not. Music of Another World is a testament not only to the human spirit but also to the music itself, the beauty of which Laks and others honored even as the lives of so many were destroyed. He writes:

Since for a long time I was a member of the orchestra at Auschwitz II and during a certain period its conductor, I regard it as my obligation to relate and in some way to commemorate this strange chapter in the history of music, a chapter that will probably not be written by any professional historian of this branch of art.