Knowing how to play the cello saved her life and now that she is nonagenarian she wants to continue telling her testimony. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a German Jew who was part of the women’s orchestra at the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, emigrated to the United Kingdom at the end of World War II, and forged a musical career and a family there. At 98 years old, she continues to live in London, but travels from time to time to Berlin, where, in a twist in history, her daughter Maya Lasker-Wallfisch, writer and psychotherapist, has chosen to live. Her other son, cellist Raphael Wallfisch, also lives and works in her native London.
“I have become skeptical of Holocaust education projects, I think they should not go there; rather, there should be museums or cultural centers that explain who the Jews are, that we are not a compact people, do many people know that there are Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic Jews?” argued Anita Lasker-Wallfisch at a recent evening at the Jewish Museum of Berlin, accompanied by her two children. “And then, when you have learned about Jews, you will be able to say: ‘I don’t like them, or I do like them.’ But, please, whether you like the Jews or not, do not kill them,” said the survivor with a determined demeanor and an imperative, even angry, voice.
For decades he did not speak in detail about what he had suffered at the hands of Nazi Germany, until in 1988 he wrote a manuscript for his children, which was published in 1996 in English as a memoir, Inherit the truth. “I have been fortunate for music; “When you dedicate yourself to music, you don’t worry about countries and countries, you live in the world of music.”
Born in 1925 in Wroclaw – then a German city, now a Polish city – Anita was the second of three sisters, with a lawyer father and a violinist mother. They all studied music. “We were the typical assimilated Jewish family, with culture in capital letters; At home we read the classics, we played chamber music, and we learned to speak French – he remembers –. Now that I go to schools to talk about the Holocaust, when I quote Goethe’s Faust, some students don’t know what I’m talking about; it is very sad. I say this because I don’t go around hating everything German; “I grew up surrounded by great German literature.”
In 1939 the older sister, Marianne, managed to emigrate to the United Kingdom, but the parents’ attempt to also take Anita and the younger sister, Renate, out of Germany failed. Both ended up being sent, separately, to Auschwitz. Anita, who was 18, mentioned that she played the cello, which earned her inclusion in the women’s orchestra of Birkenau – the twin camps – led by the Austrian violinist Alma Rosé. Among the SS officers there were music lovers who wanted orchestras – there was another for men – for their entertainment and for terrible purposes. “We were ordered to play for the SS and on prisoner marches to forced labor,” she remembers.
“The performers were almost all amateurs; At first there were only recorders and mandolins, a couple of violins, some accordion; They didn’t have a cello yet, and I appeared who could play low notes; that was my luck,” Lasker-Wallfisch said. In the horror of the camp, the members of the orchestra were privileged who could hope to survive: they rehearsed for hours in terrible conditions and had to give concerts without rest, but they received a little more food – which Anita shared with Renate when she discovered that she was also in Auschwitz – and they met in a barracks with a wooden floor. As long as they could keep playing, they wouldn’t be gassed.
Maria Àngels Anglada’s novel The Violin of Auschwitz deals with a similar issue, inspired by real events, about a Jewish luthier from Krakow forced to build a violin by order of the commander.
The relatively better physical and mental condition of the women in the orchestra meant that, after being evacuated in 1944 by train to the Bergen-Belsen camp, they managed to avoid succumbing to hunger and disease there. Of the 40 members of the orchestra, 38 survived. After liberation, Anita and Renate emigrated to the United Kingdom, and there Anita married the pianist Peter Wallfisch, a German Jew whom she knew from childhood in Wroclaw. He died in London in 1993. She discovered that her parents were murdered in April 1942 near Lublin, Poland. “My daughter Maya has a room in Berlin with family photos and memories from Wroclaw,” the cellist sighed. But I can’t be like this in the past; The past has passed.”