Radio Speech of Holocaust Survivor Anita Lasker after Liberation from Bergen-Belsen- 16 April 1945

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, born on 17th July 1925, is one of the last survivors of the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz and generally a well-known Holocaust survivor. Born in Breslau as the daughter of a lawyer and a violinist, she had two sisters, Marianne and Renate, and her family was Jewish, although not practicing, she herself recalled growing up “non-Jewish”. When Hitler came to power in 1933, her father believed the family to be safe from persecution, as he fought in WWI and earned the Iron Cross. When the family realized the severity of the situation in 1938, her parents tried to get the children out of Germany, but only her oldest sister, Marianne, was able to go to Great Britain in late 1939. In 1942, Lasker’s parents where deported to the Izbica ghetto in Poland; they never returned and where probably either murdered or died of disease. Anita and her older sister, Renate, where put into an orphanage and forced to work in a paper factory. In said factory, French POWs were also forced to work