Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic When I was a child, my mother never spoke about the Holocaust. I was aware that things were different in our family — my maternal grandparents, for instance, were dead. And what was the number on my mother’s arm? She would only have given me a minimal answer, as my parents were anxious not to cloud our childhood with that traumatic past. But it was also her way of dealing with it. After all, when she first arrived in Britain, people didn’t want to talk about it. She internalised the whole thing.My mother’s story, about her role as a cellist in Auschwitz, is told in the BBC documentary The Last Musician of Auschwitz, which airs on January 27, the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp. Anita Lasker was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław in Poland), to a very cultured, perhaps typical Jewish family. Her father was a distinguished lawyer and a decorated soldier from the first world war, and her mother a fine violinist. There was chamber music in the house — all three sisters played instruments. They read plays and poetry. They were encouraged to speak only French on Sundays. It was a background of total assimilation. It was hard, certainly, for my grandparents to even imagine that the Germans were capable of such horror. Many people escaped early. Others, like my grandparents, thought: “This can’t be true — it has got to get better.”There’s a lovely photograph of my mother as a small child “playing” a broom with a comb — she just fell in love with the idea of the cello. And when it became impossible for Jewish children to have music lessons in Breslau, she was sent to Berlin, aged 13, to study with the cellist Leo Rostal. There she also learned how to smoke, a habit she has continued forever, even aged 99. Then came Kristallnacht, and her parents called her straight back home.My grandparents were deported in 1942, and likely murdered by the Nazis at Izbica. Their eldest daughter Marianne escaped to England on the Kindertransport in 1939. But my mother and her sister Renate were put to work in a toilet paper factory, where she also started secretly forging papers for French prisoners of war. When my mother and Renate tried to flee to the free part of France, they were arrested at the train station by the Gestapo. On their way to the police station, both sisters swallowed capsules of cyanide given to them by a family friend, but it turned out to be sugar. The friend had thought: maybe they stand a chance. Their imprisonment was lucky — as criminals, they were saved from being immediately sent to a concentration camp.It was Alma’s iron discipline that kept them going, and kept their eye on the music rather than on the smoke coming out of the chimneysMy mother and aunt were eventually deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in December 1943. But again, fate struck. As she was being “processed”, my mother was told that the women’s band needed a cellist. There were orchestras in many of the concentration camps. The Germans must have thought (because everything was very well thought out after all, and so methodically) that they could control many things through music. The function of the women’s orchestra at Birkenau was to play arrangements of march tunes so that the slave labourers would exit and return to the camp in time to the music and in an orderly fashion. They would play by the gates in all weathers for several hours in the morning and in the evening. For the Germans, because music has always been at the root of so much of German culture, it seemed natural: “Of course we must have music.”The conductor of this motley band was Alma Rosé, niece of composer Gustav Mahler and the daughter of Arnold Rosé, who was himself a wonderful violinist and leader of the Vienna Philharmonic. It was Alma’s iron discipline — demanding high standards of these musicians in such wretched circumstances — that kept them going, and kept their eye on the music rather than on the smoke coming out of the chimneys. Alma died in mysterious circumstances in the camp.The musicians would also entertain the officers. One day, the infamous doctor Josef Mengele came into the women’s block after a “hard day” of experimenting on people, and asked to hear Schumann’s “Träumerei”, from the composer’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood). My mother played the piece, as she tells me, as fast as possible, and didn’t look up once. Many of those in SS uniform had had a very good education. They could play the piano, the violin, and could probably quote Goethe, Schiller and all the rest. It is sad, ironic and indeed horrifying to watch footage of high-ranking German officers listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, with their childish smiles, seemingly incapable of understanding the most basic message of Beethoven’s immortal music. How could probably some of the most cultured people on earth do the most barbaric things ever? And they did so in such an industrialised way, unlike anything in history, converting the proceeds of their murder into manufactured goods — hair for pillows, gold teeth melted down, and much else.As the Russians advanced, my mother was sent to the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. In Belsen there was no music. People perished of disease and starvation. When the British liberated Belsen in 1945, it was just in time. Many prisoners were so starved, they died when they first tasted food again. They died of eating.Luckily, my mother and aunt had relatives in England who could sponsor them coming over. And when she arrived she lost no time in picking up the strands of her lost musical education. She found a wonderful cello teacher in William Pleeth (who later taught Jacqueline du Pré), went to the Guildhall School of Music, and was involved in musical circles that became the English Chamber Orchestra. And she met my father, the pianist Peter Wallfisch, whom she knew from school in Breslau. I was born in London in 1953, and became a cellist, too. This is life — chance encounters, serendipity. If my mother had not mentioned she played the cello at Auschwitz, it would have all been very different.Remarkably, a few years ago — and thanks to my sister Maya, a psychotherapist who is very interested in second-generation trauma — my mother met the son and grandson of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss in her house. The encounter is recorded in the documentary The Commandant’s Shadow (2024). The grandson, now an evangelical preacher, says, at one point: “The Jews are God’s chosen people.” And my mother says, “Only what for are we chosen? Why don’t you choose somebody else for a change?” That’s quite typical of her wry humour.For The Last Musician of Auschwitz, I visited Birkenau, and played the cello in a quartet (along with my wife, Libby, a violinist) by the archway into the camp, and in the forest behind the ruins of the gas chambers. Making music there is a truly profound and deeply moving experience. I felt that in some way, I could — for those moments — make a connection through music with all the people that were there in the worst times. I feel everybody should visit the camps, and face history.Lately, I have been completing a recording project entitled “Voices in the Wilderness” for the German label CPO, focused on exiled Jewish composers, with the collaboration of conductor and pianist Ed Spanjaard, himself the son of an Auschwitz survivor. Most recently we have been recording the music of the Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans, whose mother was Jewish, and whose music was banned in 1942. My mother says that the Nazis tried to kill everybody and everything, but they could not kill music. Music lives in your head. It is indestructible. It is wonderful that such music is now having a fantastic new life.‘The Last Musician of Auschwitz’ airs on BBC Two and iPlayer on January 27As told to En Liang KhongFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
