After the Anschluss to Nazi Germany, his mother ensured that her 16-year-old son Andre was able to emigrate to England with a Kindertransport as a racially persecuted person at the end of 1938.
Through an encounter with the later poet Erich Fried - also a former pupil of Wasagymnasium - he found contact with the exile organisation Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ), which also financed his studies.
In 1946 he continued his music studies, which had been interrupted in exile, at the Hochschule für Musik in the western part of Berlin with Reinhard Schwarz-Schilling and Hermann Wunsch (composition) and Richard Rössler (piano).
From 1950 to 1951, Andre Asriel was a master student at the Deutsche Akademie der Künste (East Berlin) with Hanns Eisler.
In 1951, Asriel was awarded the National Prize of the GDR, in 1970 the Kunstpreis des FDGB [de], and in 1974 and 1982 the Patriotic Order of Merit.