Inherit the Truth

The Cellist of Auschwitz

De: Anita Lasker-Wallfisch

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 Told through Anita's sharp-etched memories, alongside family letters and other historical documents, Inherit the Truth is a portrait of how their everyday life - cello and Latin grammar lessons, reading books as a family - turned by degrees to one of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.

©2026 Anita Lasker-Wallfisch (P)2026 Faber & Faber