Inherit the truth, 1939-1945 - Anita Lasker-Wallfisch

This autobiography relates the author's experiences, as well as those of her sister Renate, as a prisoner at both Auschwitz and Belsen. It tells how their lives were saved by courage, ingenuity, and several improbable strokes of luck. At Auschwitz, Anita escaped death through her talents as a cellist when she was co-opted onto the camp orchestra. The book contains a number of documents, most of them now lodged in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London. There is a sequence of letters to her sister Marianne in England, from just before the War to 1942, when her parents were deported and liquidated. The predicament of Anita and Renate inside the concentration camps is conveyed, and the text shows how the sisters' capture while fleeing to Paris turned out to be a stroke of "luck" - they were sent to prison and thus spared the much worse horrors of Auschwitz for a crucial year in the middle of the War. This text featured in BBC Radio 4's "Desert Island Discs" programme on August 25, 1996, and in addition a BBC TV film was screened in October 1996.