War Classics – Inherit the truth: The Cellist of Auschwitz

When Anita Lasker came to Britain in March 1946, 80 years ago, having survived Auschwitz and having been liberated at death’s door from Belsen, she found that no one wanted to hear about her terrible experiences in the camps. Britons wanted to move on from the horrors of the past and look to the promise of the future. And people thought it would upset her to recall the terrors of camp life. So Anita stopped talking about what had happened to her in Hitler’s death camps. Her two children, born in the 1950s, grew up knowing nothing of their mother’s harrowing previous life. It was not until the mid-1980s that colleagues in the orchestra she played in got her talking and encouraged her to