Trudy Gold
Trudy Gold in Conversation with Anita Lasker-Wallfisch
Summary
A remarkable conversation with Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who discusses her family’s life in Breslau, their harrowing experiences during Kristallnacht, and her attempts to escape. She also talks about becoming a cellist in the Auschwitz orchestra and her time in Belsen, as well as her thoughts on Holocaust education and her complicated relationship with Germans.
Trudy Gold
Trudy Gold was the CEO of the London Jewish Cultural Centre and a founding member of the British delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Throughout her career she taught modern Jewish history at schools, universities, and to adult groups and ran seminars on Holocaust education in the UK, Eastern Europe, and China. She also led Jewish educational tours all over the world. Trudy was the educational director of the student resources “Understanding the Holocaust” and “Holocaust Explained” and the author of The Timechart History of Jewish Civilization.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, one of three sisters, was born in Breslau in 1925. Her father, who was awarded the Iron Cross in WWI, was a lawyer. Her mother was a violinist and her uncle a chess master. Her sister Marianne managed to escape to England in I939. In April 1942, her parents were deported and murdered. Anita and her sister Renata were working in a paper factory and spared. They began to forge documents to enable French forced laborers to escape. In September 1942 she and Renata tried to escape but were arrested by the Gestapo at the train station and imprisoned. The two sisters were sent to Auschwitz in December 1943. Anita was a talented musician and became a member of the Women’s Orchestra. As she later said, “The cello saved my life.” In the wake of the Soviet advance, Anita and her sister were part of the evacuation from the camp in October 1944. From the hell of Auschwitz, she arrived in the hell of Bergen Belsen. On April 15th, 1945, the British army took the camp. Anita was a witness at the Belsen Trial of I945. She came to Britain in I946 and cofounded the English Chamber Orchestra. She married the pianist Peter Wallfisch and has two children, four grandchildren, and three great grandchildren.
Well, Germans are a bit peculiar in that way. Hierarchy is very, very important. If somebody of a higher position says something, even if you think it’s not right, but it must be right.
Auschwitz was one of the richest places you can imagine in the whole of Europe. That’s how we had the instruments. Somebody, a cellist arrived there who went up in smoke, but they kept the cello and that’s the cello I played on. Every morning we had to march out and sit at the gate and play marches, because Auschwitz or Birkenau was surrounded by factories like and all the factories where the prisoners worked. So we sat there for about an hour and played marches for the prisoners to walk out, nice, left, right, left, right to their workplace. And in the evening, then we went back to our block and we started learning pieces. And in the evening, we did the same thing for the return journey. So that was our job.
I don’t believe in an old man sitting up there and looking that everything is okay. Because if there was, he is doing a lousy job.