“HThis is Anita Lasker, a German Jew”, says a voice, youthful but precise. “This is Anita Lasker, a German Jew.” The recording was made on April 16, 1945, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, one day after British troops liberated the camp. The BBC obtained statements from various former prisoners. Lasker, then nineteen years old, described how she was first imprisoned for political reasons, then deported to Auschwitz and finally to Belsen.
“I would like to say a few words about Auschwitz,” Lasker continues. “The Auschwitz prisoners, the few who survived, all fear that the world will not believe what happened there.” She goes on to describe some of the events – scenes not yet known to a worldwide audience. “A doctor and a commandant stood on the platform when the transports arrived, and before our eyes the people were ‘sorted.’ That is, they were asked about their age and state of health. … Right, left, right, left. Right is towards life; left is towards the chimney.” Lasker was a cellist in the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz, and she played music amidst the horror. She falters a few times as she delivers her account, but she remains matter-of-fact to the end.
And she still is today, at 99 years old. She has lived in London since 1946; in 1952 she married the pianist Peter Wallfisch, who died in 1993, and added his name to her own. She lives in a modest townhouse in the north-western district of Kensal Rise. I visited her there last summer. When I mentioned the BBC recording, she smiled and said: “I speak German so well!” Her living room is crammed with books. She had been reading “Time’s Echo”, Jeremy Eichler’s meditation on musical memorials to the Second World War.
As the number of Holocaust survivors continues to dwindle, Lasker-Wallfisch is one of the most powerful and eloquent witnesses still alive. More than that, she embodies a lost way of life – the intellectual spark of pre-Hitler German-Jewish culture. With her white hair, ruddy face and discerning eyes, she looks twenty years younger than her age. She is caustically funny. She speaks in epigrams and aphorisms. She has no patience for sentimentality or stupidity. An unrepentant smoker, she punctuates her remarks with well-timed puffs on a cigarette. Her voice has dropped at least an octave since 1945. The word “indomitable” might have been invented for her. She is perhaps the most awe-inspiring person I have ever met.
“I recently had a visitor again,” she said to me. “The son of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. He is sitting on the chair exactly where you are sitting now.”
This meeting can be seen in Daniela Völker’s new documentary, The Commander’s Shadow, now streaming on Max. The film focuses mainly on Höss’ descendants and their attempts to come to terms with the mass murderer at the head of their family. Lasker-Wallfisch’s daughter Maya, a psychotherapist, is also a prominent figure. Amidst a tableau of tortured souls, Lasker-Wallfisch appears as the dea ex machina of ironic reason. The spectacle offers a remarkable reversal of power. As she put it to me with a slightly mischievous undertone: “I have never seen anyone who so nervous to come into my little house!”
For decades, Lasker-Wallfisch spoke relatively little about her Holocaust experiences. She focused on establishing herself as a musician—she was a founding member of the English Chamber Orchestra—and raising a family. Her son Raphael is a well-known cellist in his own right; her grandson Simon is a classical baritone from Berlin, her granddaughter Joanna is a singer-songwriter from Los Angeles, and her grandson Benjamin is a Hollywood film composer (“Twisters,” “The Flash”). It wasn’t that she wanted to forget Auschwitz and Belsen; she would talk about them if asked. But she wasn’t asked often, and she eventually wrote down her memories for her family to preserve. In 1993, she read some passages from the manuscript to the BBC, which attracted interest from publishers. The memoir was published in 1996 under the title “Inherit the Truth, 1939-1945.” Two years later, Lasker-Wallfisch gave an extensive interview to the USC Shoah Foundation.
She was born in the Prussian-Silesian city of Breslau, now Wrocław, in Poland. Her father, Alfons, had a successful law practice; her mother, Edith, was a gifted violinist. Lasker-Wallfisch and her sisters, Marianne and Renate, all played instruments. On Sundays, the family spoke French so the children could retain the skills they had learned from a governess. Lasker-Wallfisch writes, “In my youthful ignorance, I thought this utterly ridiculous, and so I kept quiet on Sundays.” Saturday afternoons were devoted to coffee, pastries, and readings of Goethe and Schiller. Like so many educated German-Jewish families, the Laskers believed in the greatness of German culture, and their devotion made it harder to see what was being done in the name of that culture. The fact that Alfons had received the Iron Cross for his service in World War I seemed to provide additional insurance. In “The Commander’s Shadow,” Lasker-Wallfisch recalls: “Unfortunately, my father was a complete optimist. He always said: ‘The Germans can’t be that stupid.’ And then it became clear to him: The Germans Are so stupid.”
Lasker-Wallfisch’s cello playing improved, but her parents wanted her to continue at all costs. Since no one in Breslau would accept a Jewish student, she was sent to Berlin to study with Leo Rostal, who later fled to the United States. It was 1938, and Lasker-Wallfisch was only thirteen. In her relative innocence, she enjoyed being alone and wandering around the city, but Kristallnacht ended the idyll. She remembers a pungent smell of alcohol the next morning; liquor stores had been smashed and their contents flowed into the gutters.
Lasker-Wallfisch returned to Breslau, where the situation grew grimmer by the month. A chapter of her book, entitled “The Destruction of a Family,” reprints family letters from this period. Marianne, the eldest child, had arrived in England shortly before the German invasion of Poland. There were plans for Renate to follow her there and Anita to go to Paris, but the outbreak of war trapped the girls in Germany. While Alfons made increasingly desperate efforts to organize an escape, he tried to maintain a semblance of normality. In one letter he writes: “First we read ‘Don Carlos’ and then we ventured into ‘Faust.’ We have just finished the first part. I think it was a good idea. All the participants enjoyed it a lot.” On another occasion he talks proudly of Anita’s concert appearances and her knowledge of Latin.
On April 9, 1942, Alfons and Edith were deported. Anita and Renate wanted to go with them, but Alfons refused. “Wherever we go, you will soon be there,” he said. The last message he sent was a quote from Psalm 121: “I lift up my eyes to the mountains; from there comes my help.” Alfons and Edith were probably murdered in the Izbica transit ghetto, where mass murders took place in November 1942.
The next stage in Lasker-Wallfisch’s story is the stuff of a thriller. She and Renate were forced to work in a paper factory that also housed French prisoners of war. The sisters began forging papers for prisoners planning an escape. They were masters of their work – Lasker-Wallfisch later saw one of their forgeries in the Imperial War Museum – but they were caught trying to escape themselves. As they were being led to Gestapo headquarters, they decided to take cyanide capsules given to them by a friend, the conductor Konrad Latte. “When my tongue touched the white powder,” writes Lasker-Wallfisch, “I thought I was going to die, and I remember feeling quite dizzy.” But it turned out that Latte had changed her mind and secretly replaced the cyanide with sugar. After the war, Lasker-Wallfisch was able to express her gratitude. In her inimitable way, she said to Latte: “Thank you for the sugar. I enjoyed it.”
The sisters were tried and convicted – which they eventually realised was a stroke of luck. Two friends who had escaped punishment were soon murdered in Auschwitz. But when Lasker-Wallfisch was sent to the same dreaded place in 1943, she arrived with a group of Card booklets– prisoners with a file – who were not subjected to any selection. Card holder could be summoned to further court proceedings; their disposal could therefore cause bureaucratic complications. Lasker-Wallfisch writes: “It was definitely better to arrive in Auschwitz as a convicted criminal than as an innocent citizen.” But she was not lucky then. In her interview for the Shoah Project, she recalled the scene: “It was freezing cold – it was December in Poland. A tremendous noise, shouting, dogs barking and people in cloaks, black cloaks, running around. I mean, not exactly the most welcoming atmosphere.”
During the admission, during which her hair was shaved off and a number tattooed on her arm, Lasker-Wallfisch mentioned in passing that she played the cello. “This is fantastic,” said one of the prisoner orderlies. “You are being saved.” Soon Lasker-Wallfisch was speaking with a “pretty lady in a camel-hair coat and headscarf” – Alma Rosé, the daughter of the famous violinist Arnold Rosé and Justine Rosé-Mahler, Gustav Mahler’s sister. Rosé was the conductor of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra and needed a cellist. The female musicians were given preferential treatment because the SS leaders liked to have live music in the camp. At one point Lasker-Wallfisch played Schumann’s “Träumerei” for Josef Mengele.
