Jewish Underground Fighter and Holocaust Surviver Tells her Story

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In 1941, she and her sister Renata were conscripted to work in a paper factory, while their other sister made it to London.

Their parents were sent to Isbiza, near Lubin — a place where victims had to dig their own graves before undressing and being shot into them.

The sisters never saw their parents again.

“I can’t describe that feeling,” said Mrs Lasker-Wallfisch. “We were all alone. It was terrible.”

After a few months sticking labels on toilet rolls, the sisters were asked to help forge papers for French slave labourers.

Using skills writing gothic script they had learnt at school, they quickly “got into the business in a big way”, passing documents through a hole in the wall between the Jewish toilet and the factory.

“We knew it was completely crazy, but anything was better than waiting to be killed by the Gestapo,” said Mrs Lasker-Wallfisch, who found out later that one of the papers she had prepared was for English POW Eric Williams, now famous for digging tunnels out of two prison camps in Poland and Germany.

Six months later, the sisters were caught trying to escape and sent to jail – a lucky break in the inverted world of Nazi Germany as it delayed their trip to Auschwitz and later labelled them as “criminals” rather than “Jews” at the death camp.

“The conditions in the prison were terrible, but they were ten times better than the concentration camps,” she added.

“Nobody kills you there.”

They expected to be gassed immediately after finally arriving at Auschwitz in 1943, but the young cellist made herself indispensable by playing in the orchestra to soothe the nerves of the Nazis after they had sent millions of people to their deaths.

At one point she found herself playing Schumann’s Traumerei for the infamous doctor of Auschwitz, Josef Mengele, nicknamed the Angel of Death.

But nothing could prepare the sisters for what they witnessed at Bergen-Belsen, where they were sent in 1944.

“It was terrible, just unbelievable,” Mrs Lasker- Wallfisch said."

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