Description

Told in her own words, this is the incredible true story of one young woman’s survival of Auschwitz and Belsen because she happened to play the cello.

With a new foreword by Philippe Sands.

Although my head was shaved and I had a number on my arm, I had not lost my identity totally. I may no longer have had a name, but I was identifiable . I was ‘the cellist’.

When eighteen-year-old Anita arrived at Auschwitz, she found herself plucked from the Nazi death machine by a twist of fate: she played the cello, and the camp orchestra needed a cellist. Now the last living survivor of the Auschwitz Women’s Orchestra, this is her story told in her own words.

Like so many German Jewish schoolgirls, Anita had been busy with her studies and ambitions when her everyday life began to turn by degrees into one of unimaginable horror. School was cancelled, her parents were summoned for deportation, and when she and her sister, Renate, attempted to escape to France, they were arrested and imprisoned. Through her sharp-etched memories, alongside family letters, photos, and other historical documents, Inherit the Truth leads us into one of humanity’s darkest chapters, where we are forced to confront the fragility of the line between civilisation and barbarity.

Marking the eightieth anniversary of her arrival in the UK after her release from Belsen concentration camp, and with a new introduction by Philippe Sands, Anita’s account of her and her sister’s survival of both Auschwitz and Belsen is a testament to their remarkable courage, resilience, ingenuity and luck.

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s book Inherit the Truth: The Cellist of Auschwitz was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 26-04-2026