Holocaust Testimony: Anita Lasker-Wallfisch

I was born in the town of Breslau, which was German then and is Polish now. My father was a lawyer and my mother was a beautiful lady and a very fine violinist. We had a very happy home. We were three sisters and we all learnt to play an instrument. I played the cello. There was no particular emphasis on being Jewish. We were a typical completely assimilated Jewish liberal family.

“Culture” was a very important part of our lives. We read the classics every Saturday afternoon, a great deal of chamber music was played in our home and we were brought up speaking French. In fact, there was a rule in our house that on Sundays French only had to be spoken. My father maintained that people have as many souls as they have languages. Life seemed normal and it was inconceivable that it should not continue to be so.

My first encounter with antisemitism was at the school I attended. I was eight years old. I was about to wipe the blackboard and one of the children said, “Don’t give the Jew the sponge.” This is a long time ago, but I have never forgotten it. Then suddenly some children spat at me in the street and called me a dirty Jew. I did not really understand what was going on. One just had to accept that one was different. One did not belong to the master race.

When I was twelve years old, it became impossible to continue my cello lessons because there were no Jewish cello teachers left in Breslau, and it had become too dangerous for an “Aryan” cellist to teach a Jewish child. With some difficulties, my parents got permission for me to leave school and go to Berlin, where I had private tuition in school subjects and lessons with the only Jewish cello teacher still living there.

This came to an abrupt end on 9 November, Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass). Herr vom Rath, a minor official at the German Embassy in Paris was shot by a Jew, a young man by the name of Herschel Grynszpan. This incident “spontaneously enraged the German people,” as the press put it at the time, and the first major pogrom of the Nazi era took place. It served as an excuse to unleash the worst instincts in brainwashed hooligans who were acting on behalf of the government at that time. Synagogues were burnt down, Jewish shops smashed up and looted, and private homes invaded and demolished. The majority of the male population was arrested and the expression “concentration camp” became part of the vocabulary.

• Anita_Lasker-Wallfisch (PDF document)