Alice Herz-Sommer, the world's oldest Holocaust survivor, died on Sunday in London. She was 110.
Herz-Sommer, who was believed to be the oldest Holocaust survivor and
was still playing the piano, died Sunday morning in London.
“The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life,” the 38-minute film about her life, is up for best short documentary at the Academy Awards to be handed out next month.
The film showed her indomitable optimism, cheerfulness and vitality despite all the upheavals and horrors she faced in life.
“I know there is bad in the world, but I look for the good,” she told
JTA in a brief telephone interview recently, and “music is my life,
music is God.”
Trained as a pianist from childhood, Herz-Sommer made her concert debut as a teenager, then married and had a son.
In 1943, however, Herz-Sommer and her husband, Leopold, and their
6-year old son Raphael (Rafi), were transported to the Nazi model
concentration camp Theresienstadt. Her husband died in the Nazi camp,
but Herz-Sommer became a member of the camp orchestra and gave more than
100 recitals while protecting her son.
Liberated in 1945, Herz-Sommer and her son returned to Prague but
four years later left for Israel. There she taught at the Jerusalem
Academy of Music and performed in concerts frequently attended by Golda
Meir, while her son became a concert cellist.
After 37 years in Israel she followed her son to London in 1986. She
remained in London even after her son died 15 years later at the age of
65.
I am sure that many of you remember this post with Herz-Sommer that I posted a bit more than three years ago.
Here's a video about Herz-Sommer from about a year ago.
How slow are the politics tonight? Well, Israel Radio had a lengthy report about an inner cabinet meeting that discussed all the goodies that Hillary Clinton offered Binyamin Netanyahu at their meeting on Thursday if only he'd extend the 'settlement freeze' for another three months. Quite pathetic. It can wait another hour or two, because I have a truly inspirational story for you.
It's the story of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World's oldest living Holocaust survivor. God willing, she'll be 107 on November 26.
Let's go to the videotape.
You can find two previous interviews with Alice Herz-Sommer on the BBC here.
Alice Herz-Sommer lives alone in a small single-room apartment in north London, and considers herself one of the luckiest people alive.
Besides being the world’s oldest known Holocaust survivor, Alice is also the second oldest person in London. She was a leading pianist in Prague before the war, and even now (she turns 107 this month), continues to play the piano for three hours or more every day, performing Schubert, Smetana and Beethoven in a style long forgotten, the style of Artur Schnabel, who was one of her teachers.
She was born in 1903 in Prague, then still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Growing up in the Jewish cultural circles of Prague, as a young girl she knew Franz Kafka, who was a very close friend of her elder sister’s husband. She started playing the piano when she was five, taking lessons with a distinguished pupil of Liszt, Conrad Ansorge. At 16, she became the youngest member of the master class at Prague’s prestigious German musical academy.
...
In March 1939, Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia and Jews were forced out of their jobs and banned from public transport, parks, theatres, concert halls and swimming pools, and forbidden to have jewelry, cash or own telephones. “Although we were poor, had nothing to eat and the Nazis and their Czech collaborators took away all our belongings,” Alice says, “for me the greatest punishment was having to wear the yellow star. When I went on the street my best non-Jewish friends didn’t dare to look at me.”
After two years in the Prague ghetto, she was deported with her husband and son to the Theresienstadt concentration camp (known as Terezín in Czech), north of Prague, where tens of thousands of Jews were killed. She became part of the camp orchestra and even managed to play Chopin’s 24 Etudes from memory.
“We were hardly given any food in Theresienstadt. We lost weight. We scavenged for potato peelings as people starved to death around us. People ask, ‘How could you make music?’ We were so weak. But music was special, like a spell. Music was my food. There were excellent musicians there in the camp orchestra, really excellent. Violinists, cellists, singers, conductors and composers.”
Her husband (a well-known violinist who she married in 1931) was moved from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz in 1944, and then to Dachau, where he was killed along with most other members of her family. In 1942, her adored elderly mother (who, as a child, was a friend of Gustav Mahler) was deported from Theresienstadt to the Treblinka extermination camp.
Alice’s 6 year-old-son Raphael, who was a talented singer, took part in performances of Hans Krasa’s children’s opera Brundibar, given as part of the Nazis’ attempts to show how “normal” life was in Theresienstadt for the visiting Red Cross. Out of 15,000 children who were sent to the camp, he was one of only 130 to survive.
Alice and her son (now aged 8) were liberated by the Red Army on May 9, 1945, the last day of the war. “When I came back home it was very, very painful because nobody else came back. The whole family of my husband, several members of my family, all my friends, all the friends of my family, nobody came back. Then I realized what Hitler had done.”
She then moved to Israel (joining one of her sisters who had managed to escape there before the war) and taught music in Tel Aviv. “I must say, when I moved to Israel there was not a day without political tension, but to experience democracy! After Hitler and Stalin, you feel what it means. You can read, speak, trust everyone. It was a beautiful life in Israel, inspiring. Musicians, scientists and writers – they all came and lectured. It was a cultural centre. I was very happy.”
In 1986, at the prompting of her son who had moved to England, she moved to London.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
