Throughout
her two years in Theresienstadt, through the hunger and cold and death
all around her, through the loss of her mother and husband, Alice
Herz-Sommer was sustained by a Polish man who had died long before. His
name was Frédéric Chopin.
It
was Chopin, Mrs. Herz-Sommer averred to the end of her long life, who
let her and her young son survive in the camp, also known as Terezin, which the Nazis operated in what was then Czechoslovakia from 1941 until the end of the war in Europe.
Mrs.
Herz-Sommer, who died in London on Sunday at 110, and who was widely
described as the oldest known Holocaust survivor, had been a
distinguished pianist in Europe before the war. But it was only after
the Nazi occupation of her homeland, Czechoslovakia, in 1939 that she
began a deep study of Chopin’s Études, the set of 27 solo pieces that
are some of the most technically demanding and emotionally impassioned
works in the piano repertory.
For
Mrs. Herz-Sommer, the Études offered a consuming distraction at a time
of constant peril. But they ultimately gave her far more than that — far
more, even, than spiritual sustenance.
“They
are very difficult,” Mrs. Herz-Sommer told The Sydney Morning Herald in
2010. “I thought if I learned to play them, they would save my life.”
And so they did.
In
recent years, because of her great age; her indomitability; her
continued, ardent involvement with music (she practiced for hours each
day until shortly before she died); and her recollections of her
youthful friendships with titans like Franz Kafka and Gustav Mahler;
Mrs. Herz-Sommer became a beacon for writers, filmmakers and members of
the public eager to learn her story.
She
was the subject of biographies, including “A Century of Wisdom: Lessons
From the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World’s Oldest Living Holocaust
Survivor” (2012), by Caroline Stoessinger, who confirmed her death.
Mrs. Herz-Sommer was also profiled in documentary films, one of which, “The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life,” a 38-minute portrait directed by Malcolm Clarke, is a 2014 Oscar nominee for documentary short subject. The awards take place on Sunday.
What
seemed to draw audiences to Mrs. Herz-Sommer above all, as Mr. Clarke’s
film makes plain, was her evident lack of rancor about her wartime
experience. In the books and films about her, and in a welter of
newspaper and magazine interviews, she expressed her unalloyed joy in
making music and, quite simply, in being alive.
She was discouraged, she said, about just one thing.
“I
am by nature an optimist,” Mrs. Herz-Sommer told The Observer, the
British newspaper, in 2010. “But I am pessimistic about future
generations’ willingness to remember and care about what happened to the
Jews of Europe, and to us in Terezin.”
Alice
Herz was born in Prague on Nov. 26, 1903, one of five children of a
cultured, German-speaking, secular Jewish family. Her father was a
prosperous businessman; her mother moved in the city’s shimmering
artistic circles and numbered Kafka and Mahler among her friends.
As a child, Alice knew both men; Kafka (“a slightly strange man,” she recalled) attended one of the family’s Passover seders.
Alice
began piano lessons at 5 and at 16 embarked on conservatory studies in
Prague; by the time she was an older teenager, she was giving
well-received concerts throughout Europe.
In
1931 she married Leopold Sommer, a businessman and amateur violinist;
the couple had a son, Stepan (also spelled Stephan), in 1937.
In 1939, with the Nazi invasion imminent, some of Mrs. Herz-Sommer’s family fled Czechoslovakia for Palestine. She remained in Prague to look after her frail widowed mother.
Mrs. Herz-Sommer’s mother was deported to Terezin in 1942 and from there sent to a death camp, where she was killed.
It
was after Mrs. Herz-Sommer escorted her mother to the deportation
center in Prague (“the lowest point of my life,” she said) that she
resolved to start work on Chopin’s Études.
In
1943, Mrs. Herz-Sommer, her husband and their son were dispatched to
Terezin. Part ghetto, part concentration camp, Terezin, northwest of
Prague, was promoted by the Nazis as a model institution: many of its
inmates had been among Czechoslovakia’s foremost figures in the
performing arts.
Terezin
had an orchestra, drawn from their ranks, whose members quite literally
played for time before audiences of prisoners and their Nazi guards.
Mrs. Herz-Sommer, playing the camp’s broken, out-of-tune piano, joined
them.
“It was propaganda,” she later said. “We had to play because the Red Cross came three times a year.”
But for Mrs. Herz-Sommer, who played more than 100 concerts in Terezin, the sustaining power of music was no less real.
“These
concerts, the people are sitting there — old people, desolated and ill —
and they came to the concerts, and this music was for them our food,”
she later said. “Through making music, we were kept alive.”
Terezin
was a transit camp. From there, Jews were deported to forced-labor and
death camps; of some 140,000 Jews who passed through Terezin, nearly
90,000 were deported to “almost certain death” at such camps, according
to the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Some
33,000 died in Terezin itself.
One
of the prisoners transported from Terezin was Leopold Sommer, who in
1944 was sent to Auschwitz, and on to Dachau. He died there, probably of
typhus, in 1945, a month before liberation.
Music
spared Mrs. Herz-Sommer a similar fate. One night, after she had been
in Terezin for more than a year, she was stopped by a young Nazi
officer, as Ms. Stoessinger’s book recounts.
“Do not be afraid,” he said. “I only want to thank you for your concerts. They have meant much to me.”
He
turned to leave before adding: “One more thing. You and your little son
will not be on any deportation lists. You will stay in Theresienstadt
until the war ends.”
After
the war, Mrs. Herz-Sommer returned with Stepan to Prague but found its
open anti-Semitism intolerable. In 1949, they emigrated to Israel, where
she taught for many years at the Rubin Academy of Music, now the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.
In
the mid-1980s, she moved to London, where her son, an eminent cellist
known since their time in Israel as Raphael Sommer, had made his career.
After
her son died of an aneurysm in 2001, at 64, music once again sustained
her. Mrs. Herz-Sommer’s neighbors in her London apartment building,
where she occupied Flat No. 6, knew she had weathered the blow when they
heard her practicing once more.
Mrs. Herz-Sommer’s survivors include two grandchildren.
She was the subject of a BBC television documentary, “Alice Sommer Herz at 106: Everything Is a Present,”
and another biography, “A Garden of Eden in Hell” (2007; later reissued
as “Alice’s Piano”), by Melissa Müller and Reinhard Piechocki.
A
few years ago, after advancing age had immobilized one finger on each
hand, Mrs. Herz-Sommer reworked her technique so she could play with
eight fingers.
But
though her hands were failing, her musical acumen remained sharp. In
November, on Mrs. Herz-Sommer’s 110th birthday, Alex Ross, The New
Yorker’s music critic, wrote in the magazine’s culture blog of having called on her in London the year before.
Because
Mrs. Herz-Sommer could find journalists wearying, Mr. Ross, at the
urging of her biographer Ms. Stoessinger, presented himself as a
musician.
“Play something,” Mrs. Herz-Sommer commanded him.
Mr. Ross, at her piano, gamely made his way through some Schubert before Mrs. Herz-Sommer stopped him.
“Now,” she said, “tell me your real profession.”
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