AN AUSCHWITZ prisoner has revealed she only survived the concentration camp because of her musical ability.

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, 94, said: “The fact that I could play the cello saved my life because there was an orchestra there that needed a cello player.

“If you were needed at Auschwitz then you had a chance, if you were not then you had no chance.”

Anita was speaking at an event at Sussex University to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

Alongside her on stage was Niklas Frank, son of German war criminal Hans Frank, known as the Butcher of Poland.

Anita was born in Germany in 1925. She said: “I had a completely normal life, I had no idea that it was a problem to be Jewish. I learned that to be Jewish was something peculiar and quite dangerous.”

Anita was very young when Hitler came to power, but remembered walking into rooms and overhearing adults discussing what they should do.

She said: “People I used to be friends with at school, I was no longer allowed to play with, it was hard to understand as a child.”

Anita and her family were in Berlin on November 9, 1938, the night of Kristallnacht when Nazis torched synagogues and Jewish homes and schools and arrested about 30,000 Jewish men. They were sent to concentration camps.

Anita said: “We went home immediately and then came the desperate attempts to get out.”

But this required money and her father soon realised it was impossible for the family to emigrate together.

When her parents were taken away, her father gave a message to Anita and her sister. She said: “We wanted to go with my parents, but my father said ‘where we are going, you will get there soon enough’. He knew exactly what was going on and knew there was no chance of survival.”

Her parents are believed to have died near Lublin, Poland, in 1941.

Anita found the Nazi soldiers’ motives confusing. She said: “I couldn’t accept that people would kill me for being Jewish. You can kill me, but for something more weighty.”

Anita said she and her sister were “quite naughty” and made several attempts to escape, saying she became an “expert forger” as she tried to replicate French papers for them.

But they were unsuccessful and the sisters ended up in prison where they stayed for a year.

Anita said: “German law didn’t exist any more, it was a free for all and it was easier to be a criminal than a Jew because they got a hearing at court.”

“I was allowed to survive because I was very lucky. It’s absurd that there was a band that badly needed somebody to play the cello, and the music I played was not exactly the music I played in my professional life, there was no Beethoven.

“But, as long as they wanted music there then it would be stupid to put us in the gas chamber.”

Niklas Frank, 79, also spoke at the event.

He was born in 1939, son of Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal lawyer and former

governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland.

Niklas said he “despised” his father and has rejected him and has since become friends with Anita after meeting her at a restaurant in Germany before an event they were both speaking at.

Niklas said: “The first impression I got as a child was that I had a very powerful father, I didn’t know that they called him the Butcher of Poland.

“We had very good stolen art which my father had taken, a Leonardo Da Vinci, two Rembrandts and a Raphael. My father built a room in which he adored the paintings.”

Niklas described Hans as “the most educated big shot of the Nazis” and remembered how he would speak fluent Latin and play the piano.

He said: “He knew in his heart and his brain what was right and wrong, but he decided to be a criminal.

“My father knew exactly what was going on, that he was committing crimes and was politically responsible for all the deaths in Poland.”

“All his life he wanted to please Hitler. My sister once wrote in a letter that my father loved Hitler more than his family, and this was true.”

Niklas said his father was not anti-semitic.

He said: “If Hitler had said the Irish people are the opposition of the Nazis he would have given them the same sentences, it was a love affair.

“My father was a hidden homosexual. This was found out at the Nuremberg trial.”

Following the trial, Hans Frank was hanged as a war criminal in 1946.

Niklas spoke of his experiences when he visited the building where he was executed.

He said: “When he was taken up by the guards they were surprised because my father was kneeling down with his hands together.

“He said to the clergyman, ‘every morning my mother would make a cross on my forehead in water, can you do the same to me now’.

“That’s the only time I felt very near to him, he wanted to be a young and innocent child again. Then I was furious because he could have resigned earlier.”

Anita and Niklas spoke to a crowd of about 500 people at the event at the University of Sussex’s Jubilee Large Lecture Theatre on Wednesday.

It was to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, an annual event on January 27 to remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.