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Contact: Sofia Gligoric

Public Relations Candidate
The Agency – Mohawk College
Phone: (905) 555-5555
Sofia.gligoric@mohawkcollege.ca

The Power of Music at Auschwitz

Cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch looks back at her time in Auschwitz concentration camp, where
her place in the camp orchestra kept her alive.

TORONTO – March 8, 2021 - “Music saved my life.” This phrase is often used by people who
turn to music to help get them out of a hard place.

"I was fully expecting to be killed – not to be recruited into an orchestra. It was impossible to take in. Lucky me," said Anita-
Lasker-Wallfisch, 95, of her time in Auschwitz.

For Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, music saved her from perishing in the Holocaust.
A German-Jew, Lasker-Wallfisch was transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration
camp in the winter of 1943 at 18 years old. Having just lost her parents during transportation to
a concentration camp in Poland, Lasker-Wallfisch expected death to be around the corner.
What she didn’t expect was that her ability to play the cello would induct her into the Women’s
Orchestra at Auschwitz, and ultimately save her life.
"When I arrived, I was led to a girl...she asked me what I was doing before the war. And like an
idiot… I said, ‘I used to play the cello,'” Lasker-Wallfisch recalls. "She said, 'that's fantastic. You'll
be saved.’ I had no idea what she was talking about.... [but] that was my salvation."
Amid the horror of the Nazi concentration camps, music held a special place.
Nazi officers encouraged prisoners to hold make-shift orchestras for entertainment. The
performances were also used as a propaganda tool to convince visitors into thinking all was
well in the camps.
By 1943, Auschwitz-Birkenau already had a remarkable male-orchestra. Now, a Jewish violinist
named Alma Rosé was planning something similar. She was the niece of the great composer
Gustav Mahler.
“By that time, I was naked, without hair, with a number on my arm. Because Alma’s orchestra
was a sort of showpiece, she was well dressed. I remember not knowing if she was a prisoner or
not. I was fully expecting to be killed – not to be recruited into an orchestra. It was impossible
to take in. Lucky me.”
A few days later, Alma Rosé summoned Lasker-Wallfisch to an audition. This was a formality for
her, as Lasker-Wallfisch had grown up in a musical family with dreams of a career as a cellist.
“I was taken to the music block. A music block, can you believe it? It was completely crazy to
think that this existed in a concentration camp. Alma put a cello in my hand and said, ‘play
something.’ Of course, I hadn’t touched a cello in 2 years so I could only play something slow.
But she was delighted. I came at a time that they didn’t have a cello in the orchestra, so I came
as sort of a lifesaver.”
Alma knew she had to make something of this orchestra. If she didn’t, the players might have
been sent to the gas chamber.
“We didn’t particularly like her [Alma] because she was so strict. She had to drill people from
nothing into playing music. She was trying to make something for us to possibly survive off of,”
recalled Lasker-Wallfisch.
Lasker-Wallfisch was given the nerve-wracking task to perform a piece in front of Josef
Mengele, a Nazi officer and physician known as the “Angel of Death.”
She says the filth of the camp’s unfathomable circumstances couldn’t reach her while she was
playing music.
“It felt like nothing. I thought, he is just this guy, I’ll play it as fast as I can and won’t even look at
him,” she said.
Thanks to music, Lasker-Wallfisch was able to survive a year in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In November 1944, with Soviet troops approaching Auschwitz, Anita was sent to Bergen-Belsen,
another concentration camp. “None of us ever believed we’d actually leave Auschwitz some
other way than through the chimney,” she said.
After British troops freed Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, Lasker Wallfisch set out to begin a career
as a professional musician in London, where she says she was “eight years behind everyone
else.” She studied with William Pleeth, who taught the star cellist Jacqueline du Pré. Lasker-
Wallfisch later became a founding member of the English Chamber Orchestra and played the
cello in the much-recorded ensemble until her later years.
Lasker married pianist Peter Wallfisch, who taught at the Royal College of Music in London. She
had two children.
Her son, the cellist Raphael Wallfisch, credits his mom’s resilience to the ability for her to look
forward and not look back. “There was no such thing as post-traumatic stress therapy. She just
wanted to get on with her life,” he said.
Later in her life, Lasker-Wallfisch returned to Germany several times to lecture at schools and
universities. “It took me 50 years to talk about it,” said Lasker-Wallfisch. “But it’s not as though
this is the only thing I think about.”
In a speech that marked the liberation of Auschwitz in 2018, Lasker-Wallfisch warned of the
current increase of anti-Semitic demonstrations in Germany. Her message was one of
optimism: “As long as one breathes, one hoped I’ve spoken to thousands of students. If 10 of
them behave properly, I’ll be satisfied,” she said.
One overarching theme in her lectures is an idealistic one: “Talk to each other before you kill
each other, go drink a cup of coffee together. Celebrate your differences!”

Lasker-Wallfisch and Queen Elizabeth, during the Queen's visit to Bergen-Belsen in

2015

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