Anita Lasker-Wallfisch

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch played the cello in the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz-Birkenau. She is the last surviving member of that orchestra. She is, as of this writing, still alive, in her ninety ninth year, living in north London, where she has spent most of her life since 1946.

The Lasker family in Breslau was assimilated, German-speaking, professional. Her father was a lawyer who had served in the German army in the First World War and held the Iron Cross. Her mother had played the violin. Anita and her two sisters were trained on string instruments from early childhood. The family did not get out in time. Anita’s parents were deported in April 1942 and were murdered, at Izbica or Sobibor or some intermediate killing site, in the spring of that year. Anita and her sister Renate were left behind in Breslau and put to work in a paper factory. They obtained false papers, tried to leave Germany on a forged train ticket to Paris, and were arrested at the station. The Gestapo did not deport them as Jews. They sent them to prison instead, on the lesser charge of forgery and attempted illegal departure. The criminal-law route gave them slightly longer to live.

Anita reached Auschwitz-Birkenau in December 1943. Her cello playing saved her. The women’s orchestra at Birkenau, conducted by Alma Rosé, the niece of Gustav Mahler, was about forty women drawn from the camp population. They played in the morning at the work-detail gates as the labour parties were marched out. They played in the evening when the parties returned. They gave concerts on Sunday afternoons for the SS. The orchestra was a privileged group inside the camp. Its members had warmer barracks and slightly more food. Most of them survived. Alma Rosé herself died in Birkenau in April 1944, possibly poisoned, possibly through illness; the cause was never settled.

Lasker was evacuated from Birkenau in November 1944 to Bergen-Belsen, where she survived the catastrophe of the camp’s last months and the typhus epidemic of early 1945. She was liberated by British forces on 15 April 1945. She testified at the Belsen trial at Lüneburg in autumn 1945. She emigrated to England in 1946.

In London she met the cellist Peter Wallfisch, married him, and was a founding member of the English Chamber Orchestra in 1948. She played professionally until 1996. Her son, Raphael Wallfisch, is a leading concert cellist. Her grandson, Simon Wallfisch, is a singer who has performed in Holocaust commemorations.

Lasker-Wallfisch did not speak in public about her experience for the first fifty years after the war. She broke that silence in the 1990s with the memoir Inherit the Truth, published in 1996, and from then onwards spoke regularly to school audiences in Britain and Germany. She addressed the Bundestag at the Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration on 31 January 2018. She told the German parliament that the survivors had been silent for many years because the world had not been ready to hear them, and that the world was now obliged to hear them while it still could.

The German government awarded her the Order of Merit, First Class, in 2018. The British government appointed her Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2003. She continues to give interviews and lectures.

See also

Sources

  • Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
  • Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
  • Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
  • Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
  • Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards