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Upon arriving at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, René Coudy and Simon Laks could hardly believe their eyes. “Are we hallucinating? […] Those are music stands. […] Shack 15: a number of instruments are arranged according to size.” ( Music from Another World, 1948.) This first publication by Simon Laks, the future conductor of the orchestra in Auschwitz-Birkenau ( Mélodies d’Auschwitz et autres écrits sur les camps [Auschwitz Melodies and Other Writings about the Camps], Paris, Cerf, 2018), makes clear that we have not given sufficient thought to the origin and fate of the instruments and sheet music the musicians in Nazi concentration camps and extermination sites used and sometimes discovered in the archaeological sense of the term. However, there are more eye-witness accounts than one might believe, and some of the original instruments are still around today. By studying the sources of these instruments and collections of sheet music, which in some ways represent the internal condition of consciousness, we uncover a story within a story in which the participants survived through or in exchange for music, and in which the ultimate resource being looted was life itself.