What sort of music would play at the gates of hell? When 19-year-old Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was deposited outside Auschwitz-Birkenau in December 1943, she had her answer.
“I thought I’m hallucinating. I heard Eine kleine Nachtmusik from Mozart,” she recalls in The Last Musician of Auschwitz (BBC Two, Monday, 9pm), a powerful documentary airing as part of the Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations, which mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the largest and most notorious of the Nazi death camps.
The Last Musician of Auschwitz makes for challenging, often upsetting viewing – as is only proper. Eyewitnesses recount the sheer scale of the evil committed by Nazi Germany at the heart of its charnel house empire.
“When you saw the mountains of bodies, you always saw someone you knew,” says one survivor in an archive interview.
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Another recalls the advice passed around the camp about the death chambers – that it was best to expose yourself as best you could to the gas as it came hissing out of the shower heads as it offered a relatively quick demise. The alternative was to be trampled to death as people panicked.
The grotesque joke was that the Nazis saw themselves as guardians of high culture – hence the 15 orchestras maintained across the vast complex of death that was Auschwitz. A grotesque joke – but also a salvation for Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, today aged 99 and the last living link to this bizarre musical adjunct to Nazi Germany’s orgy of mechanised barbarity.
Her moment of salvation came almost before she had realised it. Spared because her captors estimated they could get some work out of her before she was killed, she was stripped naked and shaved – and asked if she had any skills. She mentioned the cello, and then the nightmarish became genuinely surreal as she was recruited to the camp’s women’s orchestra. “Here I was stark naked and she was asking me ... who did you study with?”
For Lasker-Wallfisch, mere survival was the ultimate act of resistance. Other prisoners used music as a way of holding on to the person they had been before the barbed wire went up. We hear how Polish conductor Szymon Laks played his Third String Quartet with the camp orchestra only for an SS Guard to demand the provenance of the music. Thinking on his feet, Laks claimed it was Austrian in origin – a lie that placated the officer. “A beautiful quartet,” nodded the guard. “One could tell it was German right away.”
The documentary largely avoids the cliche of talking heads, though Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland speaks movingly of what was lost in the Holocaust. “There was a whole world that all but vanished,” he says.
The last word is given to Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. “I’m just appalled at what we are going through again with senseless stupid anti-Semitism and how badly everyone is behaving,” she says. “What have we learned?”
