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| AP -
Alice Herz-Sommer, who was believed to be the oldest survivor
of the Holocaust, is shown here in 2010. She died Feb. 23 in London at
age 110. |
Alice Herz-Sommer, a concert
pianist who was widely believed to be the oldest survivor of the
Holocaust and who became known around the world for her belief in the
redemptive power of music, died Feb. 23 at a hospital in London. She was
110.
Her daughter-in-law, Genevieve Sommer, confirmed her death to the Associated Press. The cause was not reported.
By the end of her life — through
books,
YouTube appearances and a short
documentary film nominated this year for an Oscar — Mrs. Herz-Sommer and her optimism had become known to tens of thousands of people.
Born in Prague in what was then Austria-Hungary, she grew up in a
family that socialized with writers such as Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria
Rilke. By her mid-30s, she had become an accomplished musician, a wife
and a mother, and a Jew living in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.
In
1943, Mrs. Herz-Sommer was sent with her husband and their 5-year-old
son to the camp-ghetto outside Prague known in German as Theresienstadt
and in Czech as Terezin. The camp served as a transfer point for Jews en
route to death and labor camps. It also was used as a propaganda tool
for Nazi officials seeking to demonstrate to Red Cross and other
observers that European Jewry was not in danger.
Theresienstadt
had a library. Artists imprisoned there were permitted to paint, and
professors were permitted to lecture — in addition to performing forced
labor. And amid the squalid living conditions, rampant disease and
deportations, there was music.
Mrs. Herz-Sommer, who had studied
under a former student of composer and virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt, was
said to have played in more than 100 concerts during her incarceration
at Theresienstadt.
“We scavenged for potato peelings as people
starved to death around us,” the Jerusalem Post quoted her as saying.
“People ask, ‘How could you make music?’ We were so weak, but music was
special, like a spell. Music was my food.”
At the camp, Mrs.
Herz-Sommer performed largely from memory. She played Chopin’s
notoriously difficult etudes, she played the works of Schubert and she
played Beethoven.
“Beethoven is my religion,” she told the New York Times in a 2007 interview. “I am Jewish, with Beethoven as religion. . . . He gives me the faith to live and to say to me: Life is wonderful and worthwhile, even when it is difficult.”
The
Daily Telegraph noted that Mrs. Herz-Sommer participated in
performances of Verdi’s Requiem. Once, when asked by a reporter if the
musicians had regarded the work as a requiem for the Jews, she replied,
“Why not?”
She said that she dedicated herself during her
imprisonment in Theresienstadt to shielding her son from the reality of
what transpired there. She succeeded. The young man — who grew up to
become the noted cellist Raphael Sommer — told an interviewer years
later that he had “very good memories of that place,” thanks to his
mother.
He was said to have served as her page-turner and played
the sparrow in “Brundibar,” the children’ s opera composed by Hans
Krása, who also was imprisoned at Theresienstadt.
About 90 percent of the 15,000 children who passed through Theresienstadt died in the death camps, according to the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Raphael was among those who survived. His father, Mrs. Herz-Sommer’s husband, died after being transferred to Dachau.
“When
I came back home it was very, very painful because nobody else came
back,” Mrs. Herz-Sommer once told the London Guardian. “Then I realized
what Hitler had done.”
After arriving in Prague, she sent a
telegram to her few surviving relatives in Palestine with the
declaration, “Tonight, I will play the Appassionata,” Beethoven’s
celebrated piano sonata.
“That,” she told the British Observer, “is how I told them I was still alive.”
Mrs.
Herz-Sommer was born on Nov. 26, 1903. Her father, who died before the
Holocaust, was a merchant; her mother came from a musical family and
encouraged her children to pursue active intellectual lives. One of her
first piano teachers was an older sister.
In 1931, after beginning
her career as a concert pianist and teacher, she married Leopold
Sommer, who also was a musician. Their son was born in 1937, two years
before the beginning of World War II.
Mrs. Herz-Sommer chose not
to attempt emigration in part because she wished to care for her elderly
mother, who also was taken to Theresienstadt and never returned. Before
leaving, the older woman reminded her daughter to learn Chopin’s
etudes. At Theresienstadt, Mrs. Herz-Sommer later recalled, “we tried
even harder to reach for perfection, for the meaning in the music.”
After
the war, she joined her relatives in Israel, where she became a music
teacher and where her son pursued his career. She moved in 1986 to
London, where her son then lived. He
died in 2001 of an aortic aneurysm. Survivors include two grandsons.
Mrs.
Herz-Sommer swam regularly and practiced several hours a day on her
upright Steinway. When she lost the use of two fingers, she continued
playing with the other eight, simply altering the fingering.
“More
than a century after she performed for Kafka, she is capable of casting
a spell at the piano,” New Yorker music critic Alex Ross
wrote last year on the occasion of her 110th birthday.
As
her story became more widely known, she was frequently visited by
writers and documentarians. Books written about her include “A Century
of Wisdom,” by Caroline Stoessinger, and “Alice’s Piano,” by Melissa
Mueller and Reinhard Piechocki. Films about her life include “The Lady
in Number 6,” the Oscar-nominated documentary short by filmmaker Malcolm
Clarke.
“Every day in life is beautiful,” she said. “We should thank Bach, Beethoven, to Brahms to Schubert to Schumann. . . . They made us . . . happy.”
Watch short video about her on
youtube
