Inherit the Truth

Told in her own words, this is the incredible true story of one young woman's survival of Auschwitz and Belsen because she happened to play the cello.

Although my head was shaved and I had a number on my arm, I had not lost my identity totally. I may no longer have had a name, but I was identifiable . I was 'the cellist'.

Eighteen-year-old Anita was plucked out of the Nazi death machine as she arrived at Auschwitz by a twist of fate: she played the cello, and the camp orchestra needed a cellist. This is her incredible story in her own words.

The Laskers were a talented Jewish family who could not find a way out of Germany despite intense efforts to get to safety abroad. Told through Anita's sharp-etched memories, alongside family letters and other historical documents, Inherit the Truth is a portrait of how their everyday life - cello and Latin grammar lessons, reading books as a family - turned by degrees to one of unimaginable horror. Anita takes us into one of humanity's darkest chapters, where we are forced to confront the fragility of the line between civilisation and barbarity, and the absurd cruelty of a regime in which one minute a person might be expecting their death, and the next handed an orchestral instrument and asked to do an audition. With her exacting musical demands, the orchestra's conductor succeeded in temporarily distracting the musicians from the realities of living in an extermination camp.

Anita's account of her and her older sister Renate's survival of both Auschwitz and Belsen is a testament to their remarkable courage, resilience, ingenuity and luck, and it reminds us of the monstrous truth of what happened, not all that long ago, in a country not unlike our own.

About the Author

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was brought up in Breslau, Silesia, the daughter of a distinguished lawyer, Alfons Lasker, whose brother Edward became a U.S. chess champion. At the age of thirteen she studied the cello with Leo Rostal in Berlin, until the Kristallnacht (1938) forced her to return home. After surviving the war, she emigrated to England; in 1949 she became a founder member of the English Chamber Orchestra. She married the pianist Peter Wallfisch, and has two children, Maya and Raphael, who is also a celebrated cellist.