“It was freezing. It was December 1943 in . There was tremendous noise, shouting, barking dogs and people in capes wandering around. Black capes. I mean, it wasn’t the most welcoming atmosphere.” Anita Lasker-Valfis has just stepped off the train. Before her eyes his camp stretched out more hideous than the human mind could conceive.
Anita Lasker-Valfis is 100 years old today. Anita Lasker-Valfis emerged alive from the greatest killing machine the world has ever known and became one of the most shocking figures in its memory.
It owes its existence to music. This is not a romantic view, but a deeply ambiguous truth. A harsh reminder that music can be salvation and the background of hell at the same time.
The German-Jewish cellist returns with the reissue of her book “Inherit the Truth: The Cellist of Auschwitz”. To narrate what he lived in defiance of oblivion, but also to talk about the importance of music “in the worst part of the Earth”.
Anita Lasker-Valfis, prisoner number “69388”
They shaved her head and tattooed her number on her arm. He no longer had a name. She was prisoner “69388”. Music became for that frightened girl “a means of survival”.
What otherworldly force guided the words and mentioned that he plays the cello. “This is fantastic,” said one of the inmate nurses. “You will be saved.” Opera and it happened. Minutes later, he found himself talking to a “beautiful lady in a camel hair coat wearing a headscarf.”
She was Alma Rose, daughter of the famous violinist Arnold Rose and Justine Rose-Mahler, sister of Gustav Mahler. When she was transferred to Auschwitz in 1943, she was sent to the section where Josef Mengele performed medical experiments on humans. Alma begged to be let play the flute once.
The director of the camp, Maria Mandel, because she wanted to have an orchestra for the women’s section of the camp, Birkenau, did not hesitate to appoint a Jewish woman as the head of the orchestra.
Rose was already the conductor of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra when Anita Lasker-Walfis was transferred to the concentration camp. Rose needed a cellist.
Anita, 1938
“We knew about the gas chambers. I thought I would die as soon as I got to the camp. But they were looking for someone to play the cello so I was saved. Then we saw everything, how people turned into smoke.”
Bands commanded by SS officers
The orchestras had been formed on the initiative of SS officers. Morning and evening marches were played at the entrance so that the prisoners could advance in military formation and so that the guards could keep a good count.
They also played music when the trains with the deportees arrived and at that time sorting was done who would go straight to the crematoria and who would be sent to the forced labor.
The women of the so-called “Auschwitz Girl Orchestra” were able to survive because they were given a little more food and allowed to take care of their bodies.
“If we don’t play well, we’ll be taken to the crematorium,” Roche told the girls. They knew that their survival was intertwined with the appetites of the SS officers.
Irony; Fate; Josef Mengele asked Anita Lasker-Walfis to play “Träumerei” (Dreams) from Robert Schumann’s “Scenes from Childhood” for him.
In her memoirs she writes: “We were a reliable community sharing our miserable lives and the prospect of our death, caring for each other with warmth and friendship. For us it was self-evident that our community was the greatest weapon in our fight for survival.”
A girl who loved music
He was born in the city of Breslau in Prussian Silesia, now called Wrocław, in Poland. Her father, Alphonse, ran a successful law firm; her mother, Edith, was an accomplished violinist.
Lasker-Valfis and her sisters, Marianne and Renate, all played musical instruments. On Sundays, the family spoke French so that the children could retain the knowledge they had acquired from their governess.
Anita, Renate and Marian with their parents, 1938
As Lasker-Walfis improved on the cello, her parents wanted her to continue at all costs. Since no one in Breslau was willing to accept a Jewish student, she was sent to Berlin to study with Leo Rosthal.
On April 9, 1942, Alphonse and Edith were deported. Anita and Renate wanted to go with them. Their father refused. “Where we are going, you will soon be there,” he told them.
The last message he sent was a quote from Psalm 121: “I will lift up my eyes to the mountains, from whence comes my help.”
Alphonse and Edith are believed to have been murdered in the Izbitza camp where mass executions took place in November 1942.
“Anita Lasker, a German Jewess Speaks”
Her father was right. Anita was in Auschwitz and then in Bergen-Belsen. The liberation of the camp took place on April 15, 1945 by British forces and she herself remembered that she could not believe that what she was seeing was real.
“This is Anita Lasker, a German Jewess speaking,” says a voice, young but clear. “Anita Lasker, a German Jewess Speaks”. The recording was made on April 16, 1945, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, one day after liberation.
The BBC collected testimonies from ex-prisoners. Lasker, then nineteen years old, described how she was first imprisoned for political reasons, then sent to Auschwitz and finally transferred to Belsen.
“I would like to say a few words about Auschwitz,” Lasker continues. “The prisoners of Auschwitz, the few who survived, are all afraid that the world will not believe what happened there.”
Her descriptions are shocking. “A doctor and a commander stood on the platform as the transports arrived, and before our eyes the people were ‘sorted out.’
This means they were asked their age and health status. Right, left, right, left. Right to life, left to the chimney.”
In July 1945, in the displaced persons camp set up in Bergen-Belsen after the liberation, Anita Lasker-Valfis heard Yehudi Menuhin give a concert, with the then young Benjamin Britten as pianist.
She wrote in her letter that it was “a wonderful evening”. A place that had just emerged from extreme inhumanity listens again to Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Debussy. The girl who once played music because her life depended on it was there as a listener.
“Hate is poison and in the end you poison yourself”
Her voice hasn’t stopped since. One of the most important – and highly symbolic – public appearances of Anita Lasker-Walfis took place in 2018, when she spoke before the Bundestag, the German parliament.
AP Photo/Markus Schreiber
AP Photo/Markus Schreiber
As she entered the hall, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, President of Germany, was at her side; her sister was accompanied by Angela Merkel. Renate died in 2021, aged ninety-six.
Read her text. “There were endless difficulties to overcome before we could leave Germany. It took almost a year and I swore I would never set foot on German soil again. I was consumed by an unbounded hatred of everything German.
As you can see, I broke my vow — many, many years ago — and I don’t regret it. It’s very simple: hate is poison, and ultimately you poison yourself.”
The New Yorker, The Observer, BBC, CBS News
