Anita Lasker-Wallfisch

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Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, 2007

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch , MBE (born July 17, 1925 in Breslau ) is a German - British cellist and one of the last known survivors of the Auschwitz Girls' Orchestra .

Life

Anita Lasker is the youngest of three daughters of the German lawyer Alfons Lasker and his wife Edith, a violinist .

The poet Else Lasker-Schüler was the first wife of Anita's uncle Bertold Lasker . Another uncle was the American chess master Edward Lasker . The family was of German-Jewish origin, assimilated , educated and non-religious. According to Lasker-Wallfisch, she “grew up non-Jewish” as a child. Anita had been taking cello lessons with Leo Rostal in Berlin, an older brother of Max Rostal , since 1938 .

At the end of 1939, the parents succeeded in bringing their eldest sister Marianne to safety while accompanying a child transport to England. The two younger sisters Renate and Anita had to stay in Breslau. In 1942 the parents were deported to Izbica and murdered. The daughters were sent to an orphanage and had to do forced labor in a paper mill. The two young girls tried to escape to France with the help of forged passports and the support of Werner Krumme and his wife Ruth, who was related to them, but were arrested at the train station and on June 5, 1943 for forgery of documents (also in favor of FrenchPrisoners of war , for which they were awarded the Médaille de la Reconnaissance française after the war ) were sentenced to prison terms.

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch at a reading in the Ernst Bloch Center in Ludwigshafen am Rhein (2018)

Anita was deported to Auschwitz in December 1943. As a convicted criminal, she was a card index prisoner , was brought to the camp on a prisoner transport and thus escaped the usual mass selection for collective transports with Jews , in which most of them were immediately sent to the gas chambers and murdered there. She was given prisoner number 69388. Immediately after her arrival, it was announced in the camp that she could play the cello . She was given an instrument with only three strings and left in the prisoner orchestra, which until now consisted only of violinists and mandolin players, under the direction of Alma Roséplay along. After her liberation, she stated:

"When thousands of Hungarian Jews were brought into the camp in 1944 and lined up to be led into the gas chambers, we also had to play something for these unfortunate people."

- Vienna Library

Later, Anita's older sister Renate was also deported to Auschwitz. The sisters found each other and survived imprisonment despite a typhus infection. In November 1944 they were transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp , where conditions were much worse. The camp was drastically overcrowded, with numerous deaths due to malnutrition. Anita Lasker also saw cases of cannibalism . In the camp she was in a group of eleven musicians from the former Auschwitz orchestra.

British troops liberated the camp on April 15, 1945. She was a witness in the Bergen-Belsen trial , which ended in mid-November 1945.

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch in Ludwigshafen am Rhein (2018)

She managed to emigrate first to Belgium and in 1946 to Great Britain . She co-founded the London English Chamber Orchestra , where she played as a cellist until the turn of the millennium. Lasker married the pianist Peter Wallfisch (1924–1993), who also came from Breslau and taught as a professor at the Royal College of Music in London. Since then she has had the family name Lasker-Wallfisch. The marriage resulted in the son Raphael Wallfisch (* 1953), a well-known cellist, and the daughter Maya Lasker-Wallfisch (born 1958). Her grandchildren Benjamin , Joanna and Simon Wallfisch are also musicians.

In 1994 Anita Lasker-Wallfisch visited Germany for the first time since emigrating. In the following years she went on many lecture tours and visited Germany again and again, where she reported on her fate and that of other victims of National Socialism and the Holocaust , especially in schools . She repeatedly told her life story in oral history interviews, for example in 2006 for the online archive Forced Labor 1939–1945 . The short film Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is based on this interview . Musician - Jewess - Survivor in the online application Learning with Interview: Forced Labor 1939–1945 .

In the documentary film Night will fall - Hitchcock's educational film for the Germans , which was broadcast in 2014 , she reported on her experiences in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She was one of the survivors from Bergen-Belsen who were invited to the state visit of Queen Elizabeth II in June 2015 to the site of the former concentration camp. Her red sweater, covered with holes, which Lasker-Wallfisch had exchanged for a lot of bread in the concentration camp and which until the liberation of the camp always wore it so that the guards could not see it - it was forbidden to wear warming angora wool - is in the exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London .

Today Anita Lasker-Wallfisch lives in London .

In January 2018, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch gave a speech in the German Bundestag on the subject of anti-Semitism and in September 2019 she was awarded the German National Prize by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier “for her work against hatred of Jews and exclusion” .

In 2020, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch gave an emotional speech about the century at the Salzburg Festival and told how music helped her through the war and later back into life. In the same year she was awarded the Order of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany by Federal President Steinmeier .

Honors

Works

  • You shall inherit the truth. The cellist from Auschwitz. Memories. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2000, ISBN 3-499-22670-7 (first Bonn, Weidle Verlag 1997, ISBN 3-931135-26-8 ).
  • You hope as long as you breathe. In: Martin Doerry (Ed.): Nowhere and everywhere at home. Conversations with survivors of the Holocaust. DVA , Munich 2006, ISBN 3-421-04207-1 (also as CD), pp. 160-171.
  • Foreword to: Richard Newman, Karen Kirtley: Alma Rosé. Vienna 1906 - Auschwitz 1944. A biography. Weidle Verlag, Bonn 2003, ISBN 978-3-931135-66-9 .

literature

Songs about them

  • The band Janus dedicated a song to her called Anita Playing Cello , which she released on the album Nachtmahr in 2005. Here her story is presented in such a way that she has to play for the devil (the guards of the concentration camp). She turns to God ashamed and prays to survive.
  • Hanne Kah wrote the song 100 People , inspired by Lasker-Wallfisch's speech in the Bundestag in January 2018 . The song is on the album "Y", which was released on May 10, 2019 by kosmopolit records.

Movie

  • In the film We Are Jews from Breslau (2016) by Karin Kaper and Dirk Szuszies, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and her sister Renate Lasker-Harpprecht have their say as contemporary witnesses.
  • 2010: Music in your veins. The Wallfisch family , director: Mark Kidel ; broadcast by arte on August 23, 2010, 10:10 p.m.
  • Biographical video interview (2006) in the online archive Forced Labor 1939–1945

Sound carrier

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "The Holocaust was never an issue" - The Wallfisch family of musicians: three generations talk about their past. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin 51/2015, pp. 54–61.
  2. ↑ Susanna Keval: Commemoration of November 9, 1938: New Forms of Remembrance , article in the Jewish community newspaper Frankfurt . December 2019, Volume 52, No. 4 (p. 9)
  3. ^ Dörte Hinrichs, Hans Rubinich: Main topic: Ernst Klee. In: deutschlandfunk.de. August 15, 2013, accessed January 27, 2019 .
  4. ^ "Auschwitz does not allow any emotion" . Interview. In: The time . No. May 19 , 2014 ( online [accessed May 10, 2014]).
  5. ↑ United Nations War Crimes Commission (Ed.): Law reports of trials of war criminals, selected and prepared by the United Nations War Crimes Commission. - Volume II, The Belsen Trial. London 1947, p. 21 f.
  6. ↑ For example 2009 schuelerradio.at (long interview) , Europaschule Köln ( Memento from November 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), http://www.bbgbonn.de/content/view/425/2/ (link not available), 2006 Leipzig ( Memento from December 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ Online application learning with interview: Forced Labor 1939–1945
  8. ↑ Anita Lasker-Wallfisch's red sweater, exhibit at the Imperial War Museum
  9. ↑ Richard Herzinger: "Jew hatred is a 2000 year old virus". In: https://www.welt.de/ . https://www.welt.de/ , January 31, 2018, accessed on January 31, 2018 .
  10. ^ German Bundestag text archive
  11. ↑ National award ceremony - Steinmeier: “Never come to terms with anti-Semitism” , deutschlandfunk.de, published and accessed on September 3, 2019.
  12. ↑ Speeches about the century: "I owe the music that I'm here"
  13. ↑ Order of Merit: Steinmeier honors Holocaust survivors . tagesschau.de , accessed on December 18, 2020.
  14. ↑ Holocaust survivor Lasker-Wallfisch receives Order of Merit. Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 31, 2018, accessed on August 25, 2020 .
  15. ↑ https://www.uibk.ac.at/events/2019/10/17/die-gegenwart-und-zukunft-der-erinnerung accessed on October 18, 2019.
  16. ↑ Couriers presented a hot music event Hanne Kah and band
  17. ↑ Grandmother survived the Holocaust. FAZ, 23 August 2010, p. 27.
personal data
SURNAME Lasker-Wallfisch, Anita
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-British musician, survivor of the Auschwitz Girls' Orchestra
DATE OF BIRTH July 17, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Wroclaw