Holocaust survivor and cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch meets Auschwitz director Rudolf Höss’s son in the new documentary The Commandant’s Shadow
The story that inspired the Oscar-winning film Zone of Interest has now been released in the form of a documentary: The Commandant’s Shadow. The film, which was released in July 2024, follows the son of Rudolf Höss, the director of the Auschwitz concentration camp from 1940-45. In those years, up to 2.5 million inmates died in the camp.
A major part of the film is the meeting of Höss’s son – Hans-Jurgen Höss – with 98-year-old German–British cellist and Auschwitz survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. Her survival was largely thanks to her cellistic talents, as she explains in the documentary: ‘When I arrived in Auschwitz, there was a band that needed a cellist. We played for the guards. [It] absolutely saved my life.’ The musicians would play marches in the camps as entertainment for the guards.
Lasker-Wallfisch’s daughter Maya, a psychotherapist, also features in the documentary, and meets with Hans-Jurgen Höss’s son, Kai. Lasker-Wallfisch is also the mother of acclaimed British cellist Raphael Wallfisch.
The trailer for the film can be found here.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was born into a German–Jewish family in 1925 in Breslau (today Wrocław, Poland). She began cello at a young age, playing chamber music with her two sisters. Although successfully fleeing to England in 1939, she and her sister were eventually arrested at a train station in France and brought to the Auschwitz concentration camp in late 1943. She was also imprisoned in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp from 1944 to 1945.
Following the war, she emigrated to Belgium and, in 1946, to Britain. In London, she was a founding member of the English Chamber Orchestra, with whom she performed with until 2000. Since 1994 she has travelled to Germany several times, giving lectures at schools about the consequences of anti-Semitism, and in 2015 was among the survivors who joined the late Queen Elizabeth II in a visit of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
In recognition of her campagining she received the 2019 German National Prize and was awarded an OBE in the 2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours list.
Read: Cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch awarded OBE in Queen’s Birthday Honours
Read: Cellist whose playing saved her life in Auschwitz awarded German National Prize
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