The Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Soviet troops on 27 January 1945. Anita Lasker, a Jewish teenager, managed to survive there simply because the camp orchestra needed a cello player.

Now aged 99, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is the last remaining survivor of the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz. At the age of 19, she was interviewed by the BBC on 15 April 1945, the day of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen death camp where she had been transferred six months earlier. Interviewed in German, the language she grew up speaking, she said: "First, I would like to say a few words about Auschwitz. The few who have survived are afraid that the world will not believe what happened there."

Warning: This article contains graphic details of the Holocaust

She continued: "A doctor and a commander stood on the ramp when the transports arrived, and sorting was done right before our eyes. This means they asked for the age and health condition of the new arrivals. The unsuspecting newcomers tended to report any ailments, thereby signing their death sentences. They particularly targeted children and the elderly. Right, left, right, left. To the right was life; to the left, the chimney."

When she first arrived at the Auschwitz unloading platform known as the ramp, her casual comment that she played the cello was enough to change the direction of her life. "Music was played to accompany the most terrible things," she said.

The then Anita Lasker barely spoke German in public again for 50 years after World War Two, but when she was growing up, her hometown of Breslau was part of Germany. Now known as Wrocław, it has been part of Poland since the end of the war. Lasker's mother Edith was a talented violinist and her father Alfons was a successful lawyer. As the youngest of three daughters, she grew up in a happy home where music and other cultural pursuits were encouraged. She knew at an early age that she wanted to be a cellist, but outside the sanctuary of her family home, darker forces were stirring.

She recalled on a BBC television documentary in 1996: "We were the typical assimilated German-Jewish family. We went to a little private school, and I suddenly heard, 'Don't give the Jew the sponge,' and I thought, 'What is all this?'"

By 1938, as antisemitism took hold in Nazi Germany, Lasker's parents couldn't find a cello tutor in Breslau who would teach a Jewish child. She was sent to Berlin to study, but had to rush back to her parents after a night of murder and mayhem. On 9 November 1938, the insidious persecution of Jewish people turned violent as Nazis smashed the windows of homes, businesses and synagogues on Kristallnacht or "the night of broken glass".

Back at home, Lasker's parents continued to instil a love of culture in their children, as "nobody can take that away from us". Her eldest sister Marianne escaped in 1939 on the Kindertransport, the mission which took thousands of children to safety in Britain just before the war. By 1942, even as "the world was falling to pieces", her father still had Anita and her sister Renate discussing sophisticated works such as Friedrich Schiller's tragic........

© BBC