Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, 84, was the main speaker at Tuesday’s Holocaust Memorial Day hosted by London Mayor Boris Johnson. She was sent to Auschwitz after her work forging documents for prisoners of war was discovered. A talented cellist who became a professional musician in Britain after the war, she escaped the gas chambers because the camp’s orchestra needed a cellist. She was then in Bergen-Belsen, which was liberated on April 15, 1945. She said Auschwitz “has become a symbol of the abject depravity to which humans can sink. No one of us was meant to survive that – some of us did but it was pure luck.”
Mrs. Lasker-Wallfisch noted: “We must be careful about what makes this different from all other genocides. This was just simply premeditated mass murder of the innocent, who were brought from all over for this. It was racism carried to the extreme.”

(Jewish Chronicle-UK)