Fembio Special: European Jewish Women
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch
(Anita Lasker [Geburtsname])
born on July 17, 1925, in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland)
German-British cellist and one of the last surviving members of the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz
100th birthday on July 17, 2025
Biography
Arriving in the Auschwitz concentration camp in a prison train with only a few others, she mentioned that she played the cello – and this saved her life.
Anna Lasker grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Breslau as the youngest of three sisters. As a matter of course, all three children learned to play a musical instrument, and there was a lot of music-making in their harmonious home. Her father was a notary at the High Court, her mother a highly talented violinist; they were a typical assimilated Jewish family.
They were well aware of the deterioration in the living conditions of the Jewish population from 1933 onwards, but their father's profession seemed to be an enormous obstacle to leaving the country.
In 1939 it was only the eldest sister, Marianne, who was able to leave Germany at the last moment. She had joined a Zionist group of craftsmen and -women as a trained carpenter and was able to go to England, but she did not succeed in travelling from there to Palestine until after the war.
Anita Lasker never doubted that she wanted to be a cellist. When she was 13, there were no Jewish cello teachers left in Breslau and nobody else dared to teach her. She therefore went to Berlin to take private lessons with the famous cellist Leo Rostal. She abandoned this adventure after the Kristallnacht pogroms in 1939, returning to her family in Breslau.
Attempts to get her two younger sisters out of the country failed time and again. The outbreak of war dashed all the family’s hopes; with daily life becoming increasingly difficult, they tried to come to terms with the fact that they had to remain in Germany.
Although she had missed two years of school, Anita managed to catch up with the curriculum at a Jewish school that she viewed as a kind of refuge – anything seemed better than doing nothing at home. At the Cultural Association of German Jews, she was able to play in public and give concerts for the first time. Along with her sister Renate, she was forced to work in a paper factory. After their parents were deported in 1942 with their grandmother, with whom they had lived, also deported shortly thereafter, the two sisters were sent to an orphanage. There they came into contact with French prisoners of war. They tried to help them escape by providing forged documents. They eventually also forged papers for themselves and attempted to flee to the unoccupied zone of France, but they were arrested by the Gestapo on the train tracks before they could leave and were taken to prison. They were allowed to stay together, and were thus able support each other. They hoped for a long sentence, as this would mean they could stay in prison longer which would at least postpone their transfer to a concentration camp. At the trial for “document forgery, aiding the enemy, and attempted escape,” Renate, as the older of the two, was sentenced to three and a half years in prison, Anita to eighteen months, whereas two of their friends were acquitted – and immediately sent to concentration camps.
“Faced with the unimaginably terrible prospect of being exterminated like some kind of vermin, I somehow managed to place myself ‘outside’ reality. (...) I created distance between myself and my ‘enemy’. I hypnotized myself into a state where I felt untouchable.”
At the end of 1943, Anita Lasker was forced to sign a document stating that she was going to Auschwitz “voluntarily.” Since she was transported there as a “registered prisoner” in a prison train with only a few other prisoners, she was spared the selection process – perhaps she would be required to appear in court. When she mentioned her cello playing rather by chance upon arrival, she was immediately told that her life would be saved. Alma Rosé, who was then the director of the women's orchestra, arranged for Lasker’s audition and was thrilled to finally have a bass foundation in the orchestra.
“That's how my ‘career’ as the only cellist in the camp orchestra – or more accurately, the ‘band’ – began, and at the same time my life in this small community, where touching camaraderie, lasting friendships, and poisonous hatred flourished in equal measure.”
Unlike the other concentration camp prisoners, she had not completely lost her identity as a member of the orchestra: she was “the cellist,” which enabled her to retain a spark of human dignity. In contrast to the other blocks, the orchestra block included both Jewish and “Aryan” women; the only requirement was that they could play a musical instrument or make themselves otherwise useful, for example as copyists. The orchestra's main task was to play every morning and evening at the main entrance of the camp for the thousands of prisoners who worked outside the camp. Thanks to Alma Rosé's perfectionism, which endured even under circumstances that made it almost impossible to put together a functioning orchestra, the women were distracted from what was happening around them. They were, however, very aware that they were playing in the shadows of smoking chimneys. They were also required to play for the SS. On one such occasion, Lasker had to play Schumann's Träumerei for the notorious camp doctor Dr. Mengele.
“A chamber music evening in Auschwitz! This lifted us, in the truest sense of the word, out of the inferno in which we lived, into spheres untouched by the humiliations of existence in a concentration camp.”
There was considerable solidarity within the orchestra. Supporting each other was of utmost importance, with everyone thus contributing a little to the survival of the others. Despite everything, they could trust and rely on one another. After the war, almost all of them remained in contact with each other.
After Alma Rosé's death, however, the women felt doubly threatened, because for them Alma Rosé was the orchestra. She did have a successor, but due to her limited talent there was a significant decline in standards within a short period of time.
When her sister Renate was also transported to Auschwitz, Anita Lasker was able to arrange for her to be employed as a runner, which meant that she at least had slightly better living conditions.
They were also fortunate enough to be able to stay together when, at the end of 1944, the prisoners began to be transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen. The women in the orchestra continued to support each other.
In Bergen-Belsen, Anita Lasker had to work in a weaving mill. The death marches brought more and more people to the camp, which could no longer accommodate them all. More and more people died; the horror was unimaginable. “Every day we survived seemed like a miracle.”
On April 4, 1945, the British Army liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp – after the prisoners had already gone without food or water for seven days. Anita Lasker was one of those who reported on what was happening there via the BBC and she succeeded in contacting her sister Marianne.
After the liberation, she wanted to make herself useful and worked as an interpreter, even though she could hardly speak a word of English at first. The other women from the orchestra were able to return to their home countries, but the two sisters no longer considered Breslau, which was under Russian control at the time, their home. As displaced persons, they had only one goal: England, where they could join their sister. But their applications for entry were initially rejected.
During this waiting period, Anita Lasker appeared as a witness at the Lüneburg trial against the commanders and guards of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she played an important role. Even though the majority of the defendants were sentenced to death, “for us, who had witnessed the gigantic mass murder, such a normal and orderly trial was almost incomprehensible.”
It was only after a detour via Belgium, where they had to wait for months, that the two sisters were able to reach England. Anita Lasker concentrated entirely on music. She married the pianist Peter Wallfisch, whom she had already met in Breslau (he died in 1993). She gave birth to two children: their son Rafael is also a cellist, and their daughter Maya Jacobs-Wallfisch is a psychotherapist.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is one of the founding members of the world-famous English Chamber Orchestra, and she participates in global tours both as a member and as a soloist.
Lasker-Wallfisch had not wanted to return to Germany for a long time, but finally took the step in 1994 during a performance with the English Chamber Orchestra.
She now visits the country frequently and has undertaken numerous lecture tours there. It has become important to her to talk about National Socialism and the Holocaust in Germany, especially in schools, in order to build bridges and “clean the brains” of young people, as she once said in an interview with Der Spiegel (Der Spiegel 42/2007).
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch lives in London, where she belonged to the chosen family of the Czech-Israeli Alice Herz-Sommer, the pianist who survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp, during the last years of her life.
When Queen Elizabeth II visited the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which was liberated by the British in 1945, in June 2015, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was invited as one of the survivors of the camp.
(Text from 2015; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2025.
Please consult the German version for additional information, pictures, sources, videos, and bibliography.)
Quotes
“The ‘orchestra’ she was confronted with in the camp should not be called ‘The Girls’ Orchestra of Auschwitz' – the title in German of the book by Fania Fénelon. Of course, we were mostly young, otherwise we would not have been allowed into the camp as ‘fit for work’. After all, for discarding people they had their gas chambers. However, the age differences were relatively large. The youngest were Yvette, 15, and la grande Hélène, 16, and the oldest were around 40. I can no longer say exactly how old they were. In any case, it was not a ‘school orchestra’.” (Anita Lasker-Wallfisch in the foreword to: Richard Newman with Karen Kirtley: Alma Rosé: Vienna 1906/Auschwitz 1944. Bonn 2003, Weidle Verlag)
“As a witness to the indescribable excesses of cruelty that we now call the HOLOCAUST, one is somehow automatically isolated. You live in a kind of purgatory, and I have long since accepted that there are simply people who ‘know’ and people who ‘don't know’.
“Call it what you will, faith or fatalism: I simply knew that no one would touch me unless a ‘higher power’ decided otherwise.”
“The chance of surviving the war if you were a prisoner in Auschwitz, Belsen, or any other concentration camp was minimal. If you did survive and saw the day of liberation, you were simply lucky. You were a survivor, with all that that little word implies.” From: Anita Lasker-Wallfisch: Ihr sollt die Wahrheit erben (Inherit the Truth 1939-1945)
If you hold the rights to one or more of the images on this page and object to its/their appearance here, please contact Fembio.
