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 write down an account of her extraordinary life. This she eventually did, for her children and grandchildren to read, with typewritten sheets, copies of letters, and the few photos she had of her parents in pre-war Germany. Eventually, in 1996, a publisher asked to publish this as Inherit the Truth, 1939-1945. Now, with Anita aged 100, Faber & Faber has, happily, republished the book with a new foreword by Philippe Sands. It tells a remarkable story.
Anita grew up in Breslau in Silesia (now Wrocław in Poland), the youngest of three sisters. Her father, a successful lawyer, had fought in the German army in the First World War and had won an Iron Cross for bravery. She grew up feeling entirely German and barely aware of her Jewishness, until a boy at school puzzled her by telling the teacher that ‘the Jew should not wipe the blackboard’. When the Nazis came to power, her father believed that it was a passing phase and that the German people were too sensible and civilised to put up with Hitler’s thugs for long. Like many wealthy Jewish families, the Laskers left it too late to try to get out.
Painful partings
The family was very musical. Anita’s mother played the violin; her eldest sister, Marianne, the piano; her other sister, Renate, the violin; and Anita played the cello. Together, they would play quartets on Sundays. Realising her talent, her parents sent Anita aged 13 to study the cello in Berlin: no one in Breslau would teach a Jewish girl. Anita was in Berlin on Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938. She was rapidly brought home and her father decided he must try to get a visa for the family to leave Germany. But every attempt to emigrate failed. Finally, in the summer of 1939, Marianne, a committed Zionist, left Germany to escort a group of children bound for Palestine. They got as far as London when war was declared and onward travel became impossible. Marianne was the only member of the family to get out of Germany, and she spent the war helping to carry out repair work on bombed properties in Britain. The letters the family sent to her between 1939 and 1942 form a central part of the book.
