Sixty years ago, as the Red Army closed in on the crumbling Third Reich, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was one of 3,000 Jewish prisoners herded onto a cattle train at Auschwitz in Poland and transported back to Germany ahead of the Russian invaders. Against all odds she escaped when so many others, including both her parents, did not.

To this day she is adamant that it was pure luck: “Whether or not you survived had nothing to do with any inner strength or determination: it was completely arbitrary.” But in one respect prisoner 69388 was undeniably lucky.

When she arrived at Auschwitz in 1943, aged 18, she casually mentioned that she played the cello. The camp orchestra had no cellist. The girl processing her in the delousing block said: “That is fantastic; you will be saved.”

The cello gave Lasker-Wallfisch her life and, after the war, her career as a founder member of the English Chamber Orchestra. But her life has been indelibly marked by her incarceration at Auschwitz, site of the biggest mass murder that the world has ever known.

This years’s Holocaust Memorial Day, on January 27, falls on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. More than 1.1m people were gassed, tortured and starved and allied troops were appalled by the ragged, emaciated survivors they found there and at the adjoining camp, Birkenau. In all 6m Jews were murdered by the Nazis in the second world war.

At Auschwitz there will be a commemorative service attended by Prince Edward. In London the Queen and Prince Phillip will host a reception for nearly 600 Holocaust survivors. With that in mind Lasker-Wallfisch is appalled at the “insensitivity, stupidity and obvious ignorance” that she feels Prince Harry showed in donning a Nazi uniform for a fancy dress party, particularly so close to the anniversary.

Amid the public commemorations, the memories for those who survived the camps will be intensely personal. Lasker-Wallfisch will be thinking of her fellow musicians, the beleaguered strangers who formed “families” in the camps and her parents, who were deported to “the east” in 1942, never to be seen again.

Now retired and widowed, she lives in a quiet square in Willesden, north London. Framed portraits of her late husband Peter Wallfisch, the pianist, her son Rafael, the international cellist, her daughter Maya and the grandchildren, the precious future that Hitler’s henchmen wanted to destroy, line the entrance hall.

Beside them are pictures from the past of a contented, industrious family living in a gracious apartment in Breslau (then in Germany, now in Poland) circa 1930, a picture of civic belonging.

“In Germany the Jews were very well assimilated; we led a charmed life,” she says. “But minorities always tend to excel and that is our deadly sin.” Only a lingering trace of a German accent colours her recounting of her first experience of anti-semitism, aged eight. “A child said as I went to wipe the blackboard, ‘Don’t give the Jew the sponge’. I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on.”

That was in 1933. By 1938 the Lasker family was trying frantically to escape — a familiar tale of desperate letters rebuffed by polite British and American bureaucrats; similar rebuffs by France and Italy; eviction from the family home; brave, self-deluding optimism as the noose tightened. Marianne, the eldest sister, made for Palestine and managed to get as far as England in the summer of 1939, but when war broke out Anita was still stuck in Germany with her parents and her middle sister Renate.

Three years later her parents were deported, followed by grandmother Lasker. Recounting the last night before her parents’ departure, remembering the meticulous packing and inventorying of possessions — the self-protective absorption in mundane practicality — Lasker-Wallfisch shrugs. “What else could we do? We were still thinking that they might be sent to a work place,” she says.

“And then you say goodbye . . . everything is . . . you don’t know what’s going to happen . . .” She stops, silent, and draws deeply on a cigarette. That was the last time she and Renate saw their parents.