When six­teen-year-old music stu­dent Ani­ta Lasker was deport­ed from Berlin to Auschwitz in Decem­ber 1943, she, like thou­sands of oth­ers, was stripped bare, tat­tooed, had her head shaved by pris­on­ers, and was shoved into the Quar­an­tine Block. But she didn’t stay there long. When Alma Rose, the for­mi­da­ble leader of the Lager Orkestra, dis­cov­ered that Ani­ta played the cel­lo, she asked the SS offi­cer to bring her to the Music Block for an audi­tion. Ani­ta played the slow move­ment of the Boc­cheri­ni Con­cer­to and was imme­di­ate­ly placed in the orches­tra. She was the only cel­list in the camp and Alma was thrilled to have a bass line.

The pri­ma­ry func­tion of the Lager Orkestra, com­prised of both Jews and non-Jews, was to play every morn­ing at the Main Gate for the pris­on­ers who were being sent to work­sites out­side the camp. But that was not its only func­tion. As Ani­ta quick­ly real­ized, their con­duc­tor also used the orches­tra to save as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble. Any­one who was able to hold an instru­ment could join. Pris­on­ers who didn’t know how to play were brought in as music copy­ists. That is how Ani­ta saved her sis­ter Rena­ta, who had been ill and starv­ing in the dis­ease-rid­den Quar­an­tine Block.

Out­side their lit­tle musi­cal world, the gas cham­ber was used non­stop. Alma Rose used the music to focus the pris­on­ers’ atten­tion ​“away from the smok­ing chim­neys and pro­found mis­ery … to an F which should have been an F#.” The orches­tra also played con­certs, espe­cial­ly when high offi­cials came to the camp. Ani­ta played Schumann’s ​“Traumerei” for Dr. Mengele. 

Lasker-Wallfisch’s writ­ing is flu­id and vivid, so her hor­rif­ic jour­ney is easy to visu­al­ize and even eas­i­er to feel in your gut. Her exten­sive inclu­sion of pri­ma­ry sources gives depth to the mem­oir. For exam­ple, when her par­ents were deport­ed in 1942, the Ger­mans forced her father to write a six­teen-page ​“Dec­la­ra­tion of Pos­ses­sions,” doc­u­ment­ing every­thing they left behind in the apart­ment from spoons to a piano. It is chill­ing to see the detailed hand-writ­ten list of the pos­ses­sions they had to abandon.

After lib­er­a­tion, Ani­ta and her sis­ter stayed on in Belsen and served as inter­preters for the British Army. ​“I must have been the first inter­preter who couldn’t speak the lan­guage I was sup­posed to inter­pret.” She found this ​“dou­bly fun­ny … because I had to type up the reports and I real­ly couldn’t type either!” One of the most mov­ing sec­tions of the book con­tains the let­ters that she and Rena­ta wrote after lib­er­a­tion to their sis­ter Mar­i­anne, who was able to escape to Lon­don before the depor­ta­tion. Inter­spersed between des­per­ate pleas for help in get­ting visas to Eng­land, and requests for items like cel­lo strings and sheet music, the young women rekin­dle warm fam­i­ly mem­o­ries and trade inti­mate secrets. A mir­a­cle for sis­ters who thought they would nev­er see each oth­er again.