Anita Lasker-Wallfisch

Anita Lasker was born in Breslau (presentday Wrocław) on 17 July 1925, where she grew up with her two sisters in an assimilated middle-class Jewish family. The Lasker house hold was highly musical: all three children learned an instrument, with Anita playing the cello. After 1933, it became difficult to continue with cello lessons in Breslau. Jewish teachers emigrated, while ‘Aryan’ teachers refused to teach a Jewish girl. The 13-yearold Anita was then sent to Berlin, where she was taught privately by Leo Rostal. After the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, she returned to Breslau. The oldest Lasker sister, Marianne, managed to escape to England in the nick of time. But Alfons Lasker, a lawyer, was unsuccessful in all his attempts to find refuge abroad for his family. The Jewish secondary school in Breslau was closed down and the Lasker family home was confiscated. During this time, the Jewish Cultural Federation in Breslau still held concerts, and on four evenings the line-up included a solo programme played by Anita Lasker. On 9 April 1942, the parents in Breslau received a deportation order. They were sent to Izbica near Lublin, where they were murdered. An aunt and uncle had already been deported, while Anita’s 82-year-old grandmother was taken away a little later. All these missing
relatives are believed to have been murdered.

The two sisters Anita and Renate Lasker were able to stay together. From 1941, the girls were forced to work in a paper factory, where they carried out illegal resistance activities. By assisting in the production of forged papers, they helped French prisoners of war who were also based at the factory to escape. Forging their own papers, the sisters made a failed attempt to escape and were imprisoned in Breslau in September 1942.

Anita Lasker was sentenced to 18 months in jail and her sister to three and a half years. The sentences were something of a relief, considering the fate that would have awaited them had they been deported. But events took a different turn. Anita Lasker was taken to the AuschwitzBirkenau concentration camp at the end of 1943, and her sister Renate a little later. Anita joined the camp orchestra directed by Alma Rosé, and was later reunited with Renate, who was likewise spared from selection for the gas chambers on arrival, having been classified as a criminal. The musicians had to play when the prisoners were marched out of the camp in the morning and when they returned in the evening. Stationed outdoors at the camp gate regardless of the weather, the orchestra performed marches and martialsounding folk songs, within sight of the maltreated prisoners and smoking chimneys.

During the day, rehearsals took place or arrangements were made for the orchestra’s unusual combination of instruments. Concerts with the latest hit tunes or numbers from operettas and operas were given on Sundays, holidays and other special occasions. In October 1944, Heinrich Himmler gave the order to demolish the gas chambers at Auschwitz, as Soviet troops were approaching. Anita and Renate Lasker were taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp along with other members of the camp orchestra, and also survived this final ordeal. BergenBelsen was liberated by British troops on 15 April 1945. Five days later, Anita Lasker made a radio address that was recorded and broadcast by the British forces. In what is probably the first testimony given by a Holocaust survivor on tape, she described the conditions and crimes at Auschwitz. After a camp for displaced persons was set up near to Bergen-Belsen, life slowly began to normalize. Anita Lasker longed to make music, and a cello was found for her. Her name appeared in programmes for concerts at the displaced persons camp in Bergen-Belsen. When the first major German trial for war crimes began in Lüneburg in September 1945, Anita Lasker served as a witness. On top of everything, the two sisters emigrated from Germany, which was tantamount to an escape after everything they had been subjected to. They managed to travel to Belgium with forged papers at the end of 1945, where they persisted in their efforts to emigrate at the British embassy.

Anita Lasker found a cello teacher and played in the Orchestre Symphonique de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles for a short while. In March 1946, the two were finally able to travel to England. Post-war exile in Great Britain gradually evolved into a new home for Anita Lasker. She met Leo Rostal, her old cello teacher in Berlin, in London in 1948. She began musical studies at the Guildhall School of Music, cofounded the English Chamber Orchestra in 1949, and took up British citizenship in 1951. She married the pianist Peter Wallfisch, who was also born in Breslau. She didn’t speak of her traumatic personal history to her children or grandchildren, so as not to place emotional strain on them. When her orchestra travelled to Germany she stayed in London, as she had vowed never to step foot on German soil again. It took forty years before Anita Lasker-Wallfisch decided to document her personal story and family history in writing for her children. Her book Inherit the Truth was first released in English (1996) and then in two German editions (1997 and 2001), with translations following into French, Italian, Dutch and Japanese.

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch has been speaking in public as a living witness of the Holocaust and making reading tours to German schools since the 1990s. She was one of the BergenBelsen survivors invited to be present at Queen Elizabeth II’s official visit to the site of the former concentration camp in June 2015.

In January 2018, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch gave an address to the German Bundestag, in a special session to mark the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp. She was awarded the German National Prize for ‘her fight against antiSemitism and exclusion’ by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in September 2019. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch lives in London.

Source
Peter Petersen: Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, in: Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS-Zeit, hg. v. Claudia Maurer Zenck, Peter Petersen, Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, 2007 (https://www.lexm.uni-hamburg.de/object/lexm_lexmperson_00001580)
Wir danken Peter Petersen für die Genehmigung
zum Abdruck.