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As a boy, Raphael Wallfisch can recall his mother Anita Lasker-Wallfisch being asked about the digits tattooed on her arm. ‘‘She sometimes told people it was a telephone number or similar,” he recalls. “She would downplay it entirely.” At the family home in London, questions about the past from Raphael and his sister Maya were also largely batted away. “My mother believed in looking forwards, not backwards,” Raphael says. “She didn’t want to bring up her children in the shadow of what she had been through.” For Anita was a Holocaust survivor and the digits were the prisoner number she had inked on her flesh on arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943 aged 18.
That she escaped the gas chambers after being sent to the concentration camp was down to one thing: a gifted cellist, Anita was conscripted into the women’s orchestra of Auschwitz, who were ordered to play marches as the starving prisoners walked to and from their forced labour, as well as performing for their Nazi captors.
Anita, now 99, is the only survivor of that orchestra and her story is recounted in The Last Musician of Auschwitz, a moving BBC2 documentary in which she gives living testimony to the horrors they endured. “Music was played to the most terrible things – the burning of victims,” she recalls in the programme. “You could see the people going in and coming out as smoke. And we knew it was only a matter of time before we went in there, too.”
Yet Anita survived, along with her sister Renate, rescued by the British Army’s liberation of Bergen-Belsen, the camp to which they were subsequently moved, in 1945. The following year both came to London, where Anita met and married the pianist Peter Wallfisch and became a founder member of the English Chamber Orchestra.
[image id="2194364" size="landscape_thumbnail" title="Anita Lasker-Wallfisch" alt="a black and white photo of a young Anita Lasker-Wallfisch" classes=""] Anita Lasker-Wallfisch in 1945.Born into a German-Jewish family in Breslau (then part of Germany, now Wroclaw in Poland), Anita recalls in the documentary, being scarcely aware of her Jewishness until the Nazis took power in 1933, when she was suddenly being spat on in the street and subjected to racial slurs. With synagogues burnt down, Jewish shops smashed and looted, and homes invaded, fear became “part of the background” and in 1942, when she was 16, her parents were deported to a camp in Poland where they were murdered, shot in the grave they had been forced to dig for themselves.
Anita became involved with resistance work, forging papers to help French prisoners of war escape, determined, as she would recall, “to give the Germans a better reason for killing me” than the identity with which she had been born. “She was incredibly brave, and also physically strong,” Raphael says now.
Anita had been observed by the Gestapo and, alongside Renate, was sent to Auschwitz in December 1943. She was saved from death by her musical talent, which she was asked to demonstrate after being stripped, her head shaved and her prisoner number tattooed on her arm.
She didn't raise us in the shadow of what she'd been through Son, Raphael WallfischOn one occasion, Josef Mengele, the SS officer notorious for his medical experiments on prisoners, entered Anita’s barracks and demanded a solo performance of Schumann’s Träumerei, part of his composition Kinderszenen, meaning “Scenes from Childhood”. “A great irony, considering what was happening all around,” says Raphael, himself a renowned cellist. “My mother said she just played it as quickly as possible, and didn’t look at him for one second.”
Anita was under no illusions that her musical ability would save her life. “She expected to die,” Raphael says quietly. Yet she survived, along with fragments of the music the prisoners had composed in secret in the camp, some of which is performed in the documentary.
It would take years before Anita felt able to talk openly about what she had been through, writing a memoir, Inherit the Truth, she intended initially as something for her children. “It is a very straightforward, clear-eyed account of what happened,” says Raphael.
[image id="2194371" size="landscape_thumbnail" title="The Last Musician of Auschwitz" alt="A quartet play music in a field next to Aushwitz" classes=""] Raphael Wallfisch (right) visited Auschwitz-Birkenau to perform music composed by prisoners at the camp.Those adjectives could be used to describe the brave and funny Anita herself, who enjoyed rude health until recently, when she was hospitalised after a fall. She performed in concerts until she was in her late sixties and dedicated her later years to Holocaust education. “She has always felt that humankind cannot be reminded enough times about what is possible,” says her son.
Perhaps that message is more poignant with antisemitism on the rise once more. “It has made her terribly depressed,” says Raphael.
He hopes that those who watch the film will once more absorb the lessons of history. “Things get forgotten so quickly,” he says. “But it’s also a reminder that despite all of this hatred and destruction, the beautiful things like art and music still remain. As my mother said, the Nazis tried to kill so many groups of people, but they couldn’t kill the music.”
Raphael Wallfisch and his son, baritone Simon Wallfisch, are performing in a concert with music dedicated to Anita on Monday at 7.30pm on Radio 3
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