JESSICA DUCHEN
THE “HIERACHY of suffering” is a powerful and painful concept. It encapsulates the idea that compared to the suffering engendered in Nazi concentration camps, every other type can only be lesser. The term has been coined very recently, by Maya Lasker-Wallfisch, a psychoanalystic psychologist and educator, whose new book Letter to Breslau explores the intergenerational traumas of her celebrated musical family’s Holocaust legacy.
The book (currently only out in German, the English version still awaiting a publisher) intersperses the author’s memoires with a series of letters addressed to her maternal grandparents, who were murdered by the Nazis in the Izbica concentration camp. Her mother and aunt, Anita and Renate Lasker, both survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch’s memoir, Inherit the Truth, related the story of how her cello playing saved her life when she was deported to Auschwitz and found herself playing in its women’s orchestra.
Maya Lasker-Wallfisch is the second of Anita’s two children, born in 1958. Even as a toddler she experienced problems that she had no way of understanding, including terrible attacks of separation anxiety would strike her whenever her mother, a member of the English Chamber Orchestra, went away on tour. “I was two years old,” she says, “self-harming and obese, because the only comfort I could find was in being over-fed,” she says.
Moreover, she was the only nonmusical member of a family that otherwise lived and breathed classical music. “My mother thought I might be a talented flautist,” she says, “but although I learned the instrument, I didn’t like it and I wasn’t much good at it.” Her brother, Raphael, is a celebrated cellist. Their father was the pianist Peter Wallfisch: “I only felt like his daughter when I was in the Wigmore Hall, selling programmes for his concerts.”
Then there was the “hierachy of suffering”. “If you are a child and you feel ill, and then it is said to you, as it was several times to me, ‘Are you about to die? Have you got parents? Are you starving? What’s your problem?’ — you’re left with complete confusion. How do I figure out what I feel, need or want when I’m being told those things don’t exist? It’s a complete disavowal of one’s experience, which becomes irrelevant or inconsequential; and although not intended, that has the impact of making one struggle for identity and any kind of legitimacy about one’s personal needs. If everything is recorded against the backdrop of what my parents had been through, you can just forget it.”
For her, though, that backdrop was not even present — because it was, she says, only in the 1990s that her mother began to talk and write about her experiences. As a child in the early 1960s, Maya knew nothing of it. Nor did anyone else: “Nobody asked her about it. They didn’t know what questions to ask.” Everything was pushed underground.
Maya’s litany of despair grew with the years. She dropped out of school and became prey to alcohol abuse and drugs. Finally, after a long period of addiction, she ended up in Jamaica, married to another addict who had walked out on her, leaving her homeless. It was her mother who saved her. The book tells of how she sent money for a flight back to London and organised her subsequent rehab. “My mother saved me, for sure — many times,” Maya declares.
The road to recovery was far from straightforward. Alongside her training in psychotherapy — “the degree was supposedly postgraduate, but I hadn’t even been to school!” — she married again, now embracing her Jewish background: her husband was David Jacobs, the son of Rabbi Louis Jacobs, and the couple, now divorced for some years, had a son, Abraham. A visit to Auschwitz with her mother, filming a documentary,