MOST PEOPLE know Paul Herriott as the guy who brightens up the morning: he's the presenter of In Tempoon Lyric FM every weekday from 9.30am. Next Saturday, though, he'll be telling a darker tale altogether. In many ways it's a horror story. It features cruelty and death and the unimaginable decimation of families.
It also features incredible bravery, courage and presence of mind. If I write “Auschwitz” at this point, you’ll have a good idea of what track we’re on here.
What's an Irish classical DJ doing telling Holocaust stories? Herriott is apologetic, though he needn't be – after all, John Boyne did a pretty creditable job with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.
But from the moment he saw Anita Lasker Wallfisch talk about her life on a TV documentary, Herriott felt this was a story Irish people should hear. “When I was growing up I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandparents,” he explains. “And the Troubles kind of overshadowed the fact that Belfast was blitzed twice. My father’s house was hit once. People didn’t talk about it, but they had blackout drapes – I remember them being used to make a Hallowe’en outfit for my sister. I remember asking, ‘Where did all that black stuff come from?’.”
This isn’t to say, he adds hastily, that there’s any comparison with the suffering of those caught up in the Holocaust. “It’s just that my grandparents, and people of their generation, had a certain mindset.
“They appreciated things in a way that I don’t think we do.”
He recognised this same mindset when he met the 84-year-old Anita Lasker Wallfisch for the first time.
Before he met her at all, however, he had – in the daily course of his work at Lyric FM – come across various members of what is growing into a musical dynasty. Her son, Raphael Wallfisch, is a celebrated international cellist and his sons are also professional musicians: Benjamin is a conductor who has worked with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, and Simon is a tenor. She was also a founding member of the English Chamber Orchestra.
To listen to the programme is to learn that music saved Anita Lasker's life. But Notes from the Firealso asks some hard questions – such as, if she played the cello in Auschwitz, how could she ever bear to play the cello again afterwards? The story begins in Breslau, where Lasker lived with her well-to-do, well-assimilated Jewish family. Her father had been awarded the Iron Cross in the first World War; her mother was a violinist. She had two sisters.
“When Hitler came and the net began to descend it was totally unbelievable to them,” says Herriott.
“They tried desperately to get the children out, and one of the girls did get away to England, but the red tape was horrendous. You couldn’t get the papers.”
Eventually her parents got a letter which told them they had 24 hours to report to the authorities for “deportation to the East”.
“It was just for the parents,” says Herriott. “But they were such a close family that she and her sister wanted to go as well. She said this to her father, and he said he would go and ask if they could go along. He left the house, and she said he probably just went out and walked around a couple of times – they lived quite close to Gestapo headquarters – then came back and said, ‘No, you can’t come with us where we’re going’.”
Lasker never saw her parents again. She and her sister were required to work in a paper factory, where they got involved in forging papers for French prisoners of war. Eventually she was arrested and, because she was a political prisoner rather than a deportee, made to sign her own “voluntary transfer” to Auschwitz. “The camps were run by prisoners – women mainly – cutting your hair, taking your clothes and so forth,” says Herriott. “They all wanted to know what was going on outside. She said, ‘I told this girl I was a cellist’. The girl answered, ‘You can play the cello? Fantastic. Wait here’.” The purpose of the orchestra at Auschwitz was to play marches every morning and evening as the prisoners filed out to work in the factories which surrounded the camp.
In the programme Lasker talks frankly about her time at Auschwitz, her transfer to Bergen-Belsen and her eventual release by British soldiers in May 1945. She arrived in England a couple of years after the war, where she married the concert pianist Paul Wallfisch.
As part of his research for Notes from the Fire, Herriott read Lasker's autobiography, Inherit the Truth, and he talks to her about some of the outstanding episodes – such as the time she and her sister took what they assumed to be cyanide tablets, and the time she played Schumann's Traumereias a special request for Mengele.
Herriott visited Auschwitz himself, and uses part of his tour-guide’s commentary, giving a sense of great immediacy. But what makes this Holocaust story special is the music he has chosen to use, and the way in which he has woven it together into a seamless whole. He is, after all, an Irish classical DJ: and a first-class one at that.
Notes from the Fire . . . The Story of Anita Lasker Wallfischwill be aired on Lyric FM on October 10th at 7pm.