“Hier spricht Anita Lasker, eine deutsche Jüdin,” a voice says, youthful but precise. “This is Anita Lasker speaking, a German Jew.” The recording was made on April 16, 1945, at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, one day after British troops liberated the site. The BBC was eliciting statements from various former inmates. Lasker, then nineteen, described how she had first been imprisoned on political grounds, then sent to Auschwitz, and finally consigned to Belsen.
“I would like to say a few words about Auschwitz,” Lasker goes on. “The Auschwitz prisoners, the few who survived, all fear that the world will not believe what happened there.” She proceeds to convey some of what had happened—scenes that were not yet familiar to a global audience. “A doctor and a commandant stood on the platform as the transports arrived, and before our eyes people were ‘sorted.’ This means, they were asked their age and state of health. . . . Right, left, right, left. Right is toward life; left is toward the chimney.” Lasker was a cellist in the Auschwitz women’s orchestra, and she played music amid the horror. A few times, she falters as she delivers her account, but she is matter-of-fact to the end.
And so she remains, at the age of ninety-nine. Since 1946, she has been living in London; in 1952 she married the pianist Peter Wallfisch, who died in 1993, and added his name to her own. She occupies a modest town house in the northwestern neighborhood of Kensal Rise. I visited her there last summer. When I mentioned the BBC recording, she smiled and said, “I spoke such good German!” Her living room is crowded 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 dwindles, Lasker-Wallfisch is one of the most forceful and eloquent witnesses still living. More than that, she embodies a lost way of being—the intellectual spark of German Jewish culture before Hitler. With her shock of white hair, ruddy face, and exacting eyes, she looks twenty years younger than she is. She is mordantly funny. She speaks in epigrams and aphorisms. She has no patience with sentimentality or stupidity. An unrepentant smoker, she intersperses her remarks with well-timed drags on a cigarette. Her voice has descended 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 another visitor,” she said to me. “The son of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. Sitting in that chair, right where you are now.”
That meeting can be seen in Daniela Völker’s new documentary, “The Commandant’s Shadow,” which is now streaming on Max. The film focusses mainly on Höss’s 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 character. Amid a tableau of troubled souls, Lasker-Wallfisch descends as a dea ex machina of ironic reason. The spectacle offers a striking inversion of power. As she put it to me, with a slightly mischievous air, “I have never seen anyone so nervous to come into my little house!”
For decades, Lasker-Wallfisch said relatively little about her experiences in the Holocaust. She concentrated on establishing herself as a musician—she was a founding member of the English Chamber Orchestra—and raising a family. Her son, Raphael, is himself a notable cellist; her grandson Simon is a classical baritone based in Berlin, her granddaughter Joanna a Los Angeles singer-songwriter, and her grandson Benjamin a Hollywood film composer (“Twisters,” “The Flash”). It wasn’t that she wished to forget Auschwitz and Belsen; she would talk about them if she was asked. But she wasn’t often asked, and eventually she wrote down her memories so that her family could retain them. In 1993, she read aloud some passages from the manuscript on the BBC, prompting interest from publishers. The memoir appeared as “Inherit the Truth, 1939-1945,” in 1996. Two years later, Lasker-Wallfisch gave an extensive interview to the U.S.C. Shoah Foundation.
She was born in the Prussian Silesian city of Breslau, which is now Wrocław, in Poland. Her father, Alfons, had a successful law practice; her mother, Edith, was an accomplished violinist. Lasker-Wallfisch and her sisters, Marianne and Renate, all played instruments. On Sundays, the family spoke French so that the children could maintain the skills they had picked up from a governess. Lasker-Wallfisch writes, “In my youthful ignorance I considered this to be absolutely ridiculous, and so never opened my mouth 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 that culture’s name. The fact that Alfons had received an Iron Cross for his service in the First World War seemed like extra insurance. In “The Commandant’s Shadow,” Lasker-Wallfisch recalls, “My father, unfortunately, was a complete optimist. He would say, ‘The Germans can’t be that stupid.’ And then he realized: the Germans are that stupid.”
As Lasker-Wallfisch’s cello playing progressed, her parents wanted her to continue at all costs. Because no one in Breslau was willing to take on a Jewish student, she was sent to Berlin to study with Leo Rostal, who later fled to the U.S. It was 1938, and Lasker-Wallfisch was only thirteen. In her relative innocence, she enjoyed being on her own and wandering the city, but Kristallnacht ended the idyll. She remembers a pervasive smell of alcohol the morning after; liquor shops had been smashed up, and their contents were running in the gutters.
Lasker-Wallfisch returned to Breslau, where things grew grimmer by the month. A chapter of her book entitled “The Destruction of a Family” reprints family letters from the period. Marianne, the oldest child, had reached England shortly before the German invasion of Poland. There were plans for Renate to join her there and for Anita to go to Paris, but the outbreak of war trapped the girls in Germany. Amid increasingly desperate efforts to arrange an escape, Alfons tried to maintain a semblance of normalcy. In one letter, he writes, “At first we read ‘Don Carlos’ and then we dared approach ‘Faust.’ We have just finished the first part. I think it was a good idea. All the participants got a lot of enjoyment from it.” On another occasion, he proudly recounts Anita’s concert appearances and her mastery of Latin.
On April 9, 1942, Alfons and Edith were deported. Anita and Renate wanted to go with them, but Alfons refused. “Where we are going, you get there soon enough,” he said. The last message he sent was a quotation from Psalm 121: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” Alfons and Edith are believed to have been murdered in the transit ghetto of Izbica, where mass killings took place in November, 1942.
The next stage of Lasker-Wallfisch’s story is the stuff of a thriller. She and Renate were forced to work at a paper factory where French prisoners of war were also present. The sisters began forging papers for prisoners who were planning to escape. Their handiwork was expert—Lasker-Wallfisch later saw one of their forgeries on display at the Imperial War Museum—but they were caught when they tried to escape themselves. As they were being marched off to Gestapo headquarters, they decided to take cyanide capsules that a friend, the conductor Konrad Latte, had given to them. “As my tongue touched the white powder,” Lasker-Wallfisch writes, “I imagined I was dying and I remember that I felt very faint.” But it turned out that Latte had had second thoughts about his offering and had surreptitiously substituted sugar for cyanide. After the war, Lasker-Wallfisch was able to express her gratitude. In her inimitable way, she said to Latte, “Thanks for the sugar. I enjoyed it.”
The sisters were tried and convicted—which, they eventually realized, was a stroke of luck. Two friends who had escaped punishment were killed in Auschwitz soon afterward. But when Lasker-Wallfisch was sent to the same dreaded place, in 1943, she came with a group of Karteihäftlinge—prisoners with a file—who did not undergo a selection. Karteihäftlinge could be summoned back for further legal proceedings; therefore, disposing of them might cause bureaucratic complications. Lasker-Wallfisch writes, “Clearly, it was better to arrive in Auschwitz as a convicted criminal than as an innocent citizen.” But she did not feel fortunate at the time. She recalled the scene in her Shoah project interview: “It was freezing cold—it was December in Poland. An enormous amount of noise, screaming, dogs barking, and people in capes, black capes, walking about. I mean, not the most welcoming atmosphere.”
During the intake process, in the course of which her hair was shaved off and a number was tattooed on her arm, Lasker-Wallfisch casually mentioned that she played the cello. “That is fantastic,” one of the prisoner orderlies said. “You will be saved.” Lasker-Wallfisch soon found herself talking to a “handsome lady in a camel-hair coat wearing a headscarf”—Alma Rosé, the daughter of the celebrated violinist Arnold Rosé and Justine Rosé-Mahler, Gustav Mahler’s sister. Rosé was the conductor of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra and was in need of a cellist. The musicians received preferential treatment because the S.S. leaders liked having live music at the camp. Once, Lasker-Wallfisch performed Schumann’s “Träumerei” for Josef Mengele.
