![\"Anita](\"https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/66b0ddd1a1480305e119ed84\/master\/w_2560%2Cc_limit\/Ross-Lasker-Wallfisch-h_00000219730516.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nPhotograph by Dmitrij Leltschuk \/ laif \/ Redux<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHier spricht Anita Lasker, eine deutsche J\u00fcdin<\/em>,\u201d a voice says, youthful but precise. \u201cThis is Anita Lasker speaking, a German Jew.\u201d The recording<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI would like to say a few words about Auschwitz,\u201d Lasker goes on. \u201cThe Auschwitz prisoners, the few who survived, all fear that the world will not believe what happened there.\u201d She proceeds to convey some of what had happened\u2014scenes that were not yet familiar to a global audience. \u201cA doctor and a commandant stood on the platform as the transports arrived, and before our eyes people were \u2018sorted.\u2019 This means, they were asked their age and state of health. . . . Right, left, right, left. Right is toward life; left is toward the chimney.\u201d Lasker was a cellist in the Auschwitz women\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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, \u201cI spoke such good German!\u201d Her living room is crowded with books. She had been reading \u201cTime\u2019s Echo<\/a>,\u201d Jeremy Eichler\u2019s meditation on musical memorials to the Second World War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014the 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 \u201cindomitable\u201d might have been invented for her. She is perhaps the most awe-inspiring person I have ever met.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI recently had another visitor,\u201d she said to me. \u201cThe son of Rudolf H\u00f6ss, the commandant of Auschwitz. Sitting in that chair, right where you are now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That meeting can be seen in Daniela V\u00f6lker\u2019s new documentary, \u201cThe Commandant\u2019s Shadow,\u201d which is now streaming on Max. The film focusses mainly on H\u00f6ss\u2019s descendants and their attempts to come to terms with the mass murderer at the head of their family. Lasker-Wallfisch\u2019s 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, \u201cI have never seen anyone so nervous<\/em> to come into my little house!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For decades, Lasker-Wallfisch said relatively little about her experiences in the Holocaust. She concentrated on establishing herself as a musician\u2014she was a founding member of the English Chamber Orchestra\u2014and 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 (\u201cTwisters,\u201d \u201cThe Flash\u201d). It wasn\u2019t that she wished to forget Auschwitz and Belsen; she would talk about them if she was asked. But she wasn\u2019t 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 \u201cInherit the Truth, 1939-1945<\/a>,\u201d in 1996. Two years later, Lasker-Wallfisch gave an extensive interview<\/a> to the U.S.C. Shoah Foundation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She was born in the Prussian Silesian city of Breslau, which is now Wroc\u0142aw, 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, \u201cIn my youthful ignorance I considered this to be absolutely ridiculous, and so never opened my mouth on Sundays.\u201d 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\u2019s name. The fact that Alfons had received an Iron Cross for his service in the First World War seemed like extra insurance. In \u201cThe Commandant\u2019s Shadow,\u201d Lasker-Wallfisch recalls, \u201cMy father, unfortunately, was a complete optimist. He would say, \u2018The Germans can\u2019t be that stupid.\u2019 And then he realized: the Germans are<\/em> that stupid.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Lasker-Wallfisch\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lasker-Wallfisch returned to Breslau, where things grew grimmer by the month. A chapter of her book entitled \u201cThe Destruction of a Family\u201d 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, \u201cAt first we read \u2018Don Carlos\u2019 and then we dared approach \u2018Faust.\u2019 We have just finished the first part. I think it was a good idea. All the participants got a lot of enjoyment from it.\u201d On another occasion, he proudly recounts Anita\u2019s concert appearances and her mastery of Latin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On April 9, 1942, Alfons and Edith were deported. Anita and Renate wanted to go with them, but Alfons refused. \u201cWhere we are going, you get there soon enough,\u201d he said. The last message he sent was a quotation from Psalm 121: \u201cI will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.\u201d Alfons and Edith are believed to have been murdered in the transit ghetto of Izbica, where mass killings took place in November, 1942.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The next stage of Lasker-Wallfisch\u2019s 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\u2014Lasker-Wallfisch later saw one of their forgeries on display at the Imperial War Museum\u2014but 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. \u201cAs my tongue touched the white powder,\u201d Lasker-Wallfisch writes, \u201cI imagined I was dying and I remember that I felt very faint.\u201d 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, \u201cThanks for the sugar. I enjoyed it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sisters were tried and convicted\u2014which, 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 Karteih\u00e4ftlinge<\/em>\u2014prisoners with a file\u2014who did not undergo a selection. Karteih\u00e4ftlinge<\/em> could be summoned back for further legal proceedings; therefore, disposing of them might cause bureaucratic complications. Lasker-Wallfisch writes, \u201cClearly, it was better to arrive in Auschwitz as a convicted criminal than as an innocent citizen.\u201d But she did not feel fortunate at the time. She recalled the scene in her Shoah project interview: \u201cIt was freezing cold\u2014it 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. \u201cThat is fantastic,\u201d one of the prisoner orderlies said. \u201cYou will be saved.\u201d Lasker-Wallfisch soon found herself talking to a \u201chandsome lady in a camel-hair coat wearing a headscarf\u201d\u2014Alma Ros\u00e9, the daughter of the celebrated violinist Arnold Ros\u00e9 and Justine Ros\u00e9-Mahler, Gustav Mahler\u2019s sister. Ros\u00e9 was the conductor of the Auschwitz women\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cTr\u00e4umerei\u201d for Josef Mengele.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many Auschwitz musicians testified that Ros\u00e9 saved not only their lives but also their sanity. In the spirit of her perfectionist uncle, Ros\u00e9 worked her ragtag band of musicians relentlessly hard. Lasker-Wallfisch writes, \u201cWith this iron discipline she managed to focus our attention away from what was happening outside the block, away from the smoking chimneys and the profound misery of life in the camp, to an F which should have been an F-sharp.\u201d Ros\u00e9 died in 1944, probably of botulism, despite apparently sincere attempts on the part of camp doctors to save her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the fall of 1944, Lasker-Wallfisch was transferred to Belsen. With her was Renate; the sisters had been separated after their prison sentences and found each other again in Auschwitz. Belsen was not a death camp, but tens of thousands of people died anyway. Lasker-Wallfisch writes, \u201cAuschwitz was a place where people were murdered<\/em>. In Belsen they perished<\/em>. . . . People died like flies. Corpses began to pile up and decompose in the warmer weather. We moved about like zombies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the liberation, the sisters remained in Belsen, which became a displaced-persons camp. The happiest day of those early months came when a Captain Powell brought Lasker-Wallfisch a cello. \u201ci have a cello!!!<\/em>\u201d she wrote to her sister Marianne. That she had emerged from the horror with her critical faculties intact is shown in a letter she wrote to a cousin in July, 1945, on the occasion of a concert by the celebrated violinist Yehudi Menuhin:<\/p>\n\n\n\n It goes without saying that Menuhin played perfectly, for he is Yehudi Menuhin, after all. But I must confess (and please don\u2019t take this as impertinence on my part) that I was a little bit disappointed. It wasn\u2019t soulful in the way I imagine Casals\u2019s playing is. I had the definite feeling that he was saving himself. Now it may be that the atmosphere here did not inspire him particularly. It was impossible to achieve complete silence in the hall. I was sometimes thoroughly ashamed of the audience. It\u2019s a wonder that he didn\u2019t break off halfway through. As for his accompanist, I can only say that I can hardly imagine anything more wonderful. One hardly noticed that there was any accompaniment at all, and yet I had to stare mesmerized at this man who sat on his chair as if he couldn\u2019t count to three and played so perfectly and beautifully.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n On the program was Mendelssohn\u2019s Violin Concerto. In Lasker-Wallfisch\u2019s recollection, the accompanist conjured an uncanny shimmering sound at the beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Later, she learned the pianist\u2019s name: Benjamin Britten. The most spectacularly gifted of British composers had joined Menuhin for a series of concerts in occupied Germany. The visit to Belsen affected Britten deeply. At the end of his life, he told his partner, Peter Pears, that it had \u201ccolored everything he had written subsequently.\u201d Britten set about writing a song cycle, \u201cThe Holy Sonnets of John Donne,\u201d the capstone of which is a darkly triumphant setting of \u201cDeath Be Not Proud<\/a>.\u201d The singer fixes for nine long beats on the word \u201cdeath\u201d before thundering, \u201cThou shalt die.\u201d Is this Britten\u2019s response to the atrocities of Belsen? Lasker-Wallfisch is wary of making too broad a claim. \u201cNobody has seen Belsen who wasn\u2019t at Belsen,\u201d she said to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the late nineteen-sixties, Lasker-Wallfisch rediscovered the letter she had written about Menuhin. She decided to show it to Britten, who regularly conducted with the English Chamber Orchestra. He wasn\u2019t an easy man to approach\u2014\u201ca very difficult character, very nervous,\u201d she told me\u2014but she found the right moment during a rehearsal at Snape Maltings, the concert venue at Britten\u2019s Aldeburgh Festival. She said, \u201cIf you want to hear a completely unbiased criticism about your piano playing . . .\u201d\u2014and handed Britten the letter. The composer, who knew some German, read it with fascination and asked if he could borrow it. Very soon afterward, a fire consumed Snape Maltings, destroying Britten\u2019s piano and throwing the entire festival into chaos. But at the beginning of the next rehearsal, at a substitute venue, Britten\u2019s first words were: \u201cAnita, I\u2019ve got your letter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the aftermath of the war, England appeared to Lasker-Wallfisch to be the promised land\u2014the home of the liberators and also of her sister Marianne and her cousin Helli. Getting there, though, was no easy matter. According to official policy, displaced persons could join family in Britain if they were under the age of twenty-one and if they had no relatives elsewhere. Renate had turned twenty-one that January. For a fee of fifty cigarettes, registry scribes revised both sisters\u2019 ages downward. Anita revived her forgery skills to concoct a document that helped them cross into the Netherlands and Belgium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the last minute, a major snag appeared. Immigration officials learned that Anita and Renate had an uncle in America\u2014none other than the chess master Edward Lasker. The sisters spun a tale about Lasker being a horrible person who hated children. Edward, who had actually been trying to get his nieces to the U.S., gallantly went along with the ploy and played the role of the nasty uncle. Finally, on March 18, 1946, Anita and Renate crossed the English Channel. Upon arrival, they were given papers containing the words \u201cenemy alien.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Renate Lasker later returned to Germany, working as a radio and television journalist. Anita, however, refused to set foot in her native land. When the English Chamber Orchestra went on tour, they had to find a substitute cellist for German dates. Then, in 1994, Lasker-Wallfisch noticed that one tour was going to pass close to Belsen, and she suddenly wanted to see what had become of the camp. To her own surprise, she ended up forming strong connections with historians there and with others in Germany. She began speaking in public, giving interviews, and recounting her story to schoolchildren.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n