An inner voice said: ‘Practise Chopin — it will save you’
The inspirational life of the oldest Holocaust survivor in history, who died last month at 110 and whose genius ability on the piano enabled her to survive the hell of a Nazi death camp
BUBBLING with excitement, the six-year-old boy could hardly wait to tell his mother what he’d been doing. ‘I was in a film today,’ Stephan cried. ‘There were spotlights and big cameras!’ Stephan’s news was indeed remarkable. Together with his parents — concert pianist Alice Herz-Sommer and her husband Leopold — he was an inmate of a Nazi concentration camp; so it was the last place on Earth anyone might expect to find a film crew.
As Alice herself later recalled, hundreds were dying each day at Theresienstadt camp from disease and malnutrition.
Corpses would be piled onto wagons, their limbs hanging out for all to see.
Meanwhile, regular trainloads of new arrivals were accommodated by the devastating expedient of shipping thousands of inmates to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Yet while all this was going on, Theresienstadt — just 60 kilometres from Prague in Czechoslovakia — was being touted by the Nazis as a ‘show camp’, and continued to be advertised as a place where Jews might find a welcome haven. Indeed, a few deluded souls had actually applied for admission, paying extra for a room with a view.
Needless to say, there was no view — and their money and jewellery were confiscated on arrival.
Alice, however, had never been under any such illusions. When she learned that the Nazis had despatched a film unit to Theresienstadt, she suspected immediately that they were embarking on a cynical propaganda exercise.
She was, of course, right. Knowing he’d be killed if he disobeyed, a distinguished director had agreed to make it appear as if the inmates were having the time of their lives, sitting out the war in a delightful spa that catered to their every need.
With the completed film, the Nazis hoped to dispel the terrible rumours swirling around the fate of millions who’d already been torn from their homes and never heard from again.
Until her death last month at the age of 110, Alice Herz-Sommer was the oldest Holocaust survivor in the world.
Almost until the end, she had lived independently in a small flat in London, still practising on her piano every day.
If there was a secret to her longevity and unusually sharp mind, it probably owed something to her determination to engage with the present, facing each day with renewed enthusiasm.
‘I was not spared to spend my days looking back, to make myself and others miserable,’ she said. ‘My optimism has helped me through my darkest days. It helps me now.’
For decades after the war, she deliberately suppressed memories of Theresienstadt, where she famously gave more than 100 piano recitals.
She didn’t want anyone to pity her, she said; and, above all, she didn’t want to distress her son.
In extreme old age, however, she cooperated in the writing of two biographies: A Garden Of Eden In Hell and A Century Of Wisdom, the latter published when Alice was 108.
Born i n Prague i n 1903 to a cultured and prosperous Jewish family, Alice had begun learning to play the piano when she was six. After studying at the German Academy of Music, she later played regularly for the Czech Philharmonic orchestra.
By the time Hitler’s armies marched into Prague in March 1939, she was married to Leopold, a businessman, and they had a small son. Many members of her extended f amily had already fled, but Alice had stayed on for the sake of her ailing mother, Sofie. So when the Nazi invaders singled out 72-year- old Sofie for one of the early transports, Alice was, as she later recalled, ‘out of my mind’.
‘How was it possible to tear an old lady away from her world, with nothing more than a rucksack on her back, and send her to a concentration camp?’
Not long afterwards, Alice had what she could describe only as an unearthly experience. She heard ‘an inner voice’ clearly telling her: ‘Practise the Chopin Études — they will save you.’ This was a daunting task as the Études are among the most difficult piano pieces ever written.
For the next year, though, Alice struggled to master them — and they became her refuge from grief.
Then, as she’d always known it would, her name — along with her husband’s and her son’s — eventually appeared on a deportation list.
At 4am on July 5, 1943, the day she was due to leave, the caretaker of her apartment block burst into Alice’s flat with a few neighbours. Fighting over carpets, pictures and furniture, they dragged off everything they could.
‘I think that for them we are already dead,’ Leopold told Alice.
At Theresienstadt, a former garrison built for 3,500 soldiers, there were already 44,000 inmates when the Herz-Sommers arrived. Leopold was immediately separated from Alice and Stephan.
Mother and son were marched to a filthy attic into which more than 100 women and children had already been herded, leaving each person less than a metre-and-a-half of space. There was no toliet or running water, and no one had enough to eat.
As soon as she could, Alice started searching for her mother, but Sofie had already been sent on to the Treblinka extermination camp, from which she never returned.
In those early days, Alice was protected by her talent. To create the illusion that the camps were places of culture, the SS had given orders that any musicians among the inmates should stage concerts and operas, using instruments confiscated from other Jews.
Stephan, who was musically gifted even at six, was recruited to sing the role of a sparrow in a children’s opera.
As for Alice, she played chamber music for the first few months — until the string players she performed with were sent to Auschwitz.
After that, she gave solo recitals from memory — all played on a rickety piano. Her performances drew vast audiences of i nmates and guards alike. To Alice, each concert felt like a moral victory against the enemy and a shield against despair.
When she played Chopin’s Études, recalled one man who was in the audience, people were so profoundly moved that they hardly dared to breathe.
One night, returning to the attic after a concert, Alice was stopped by a tall SS guard. Fearing she was about to be sho don my stan wan The D afte obs mor will Don
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ot, she froze. ‘I must speak to you n’t be afraid,’ he said. ‘Frau Sommer, mother was a fine pianist. I undernd very much about music. I only nt to thank you for your concerts. ey have meant much to me.’ espite herself, she smiled. Then, er checking that they weren’t being served, the soldier added: ‘ One re thing. You and your little son l not be on any deportation lists. n’t worry — you’ll be safe.’ ater, Alice was convinced that she ed her life to this SS guard, whom never saw again. ut there were times when she suscted she wouldn’t survive. nce, in November 1943, all the intes were woken at 4am and taken to ield, where they were forced to nd for 17 hours in freezing rain. hree hundred people died that day m exposure and sheer exhaustion. s night fell, the SS ordered the prisers to line up in rows of ten. Alice took Stephan in her arms, assuming that they were about to be shot. Then, suddenly, a loudspeaker announced that everyone had to go back to the camp. The line-up had been a cynical exercise in meaningless cruelty.
In the spring of 1944, the SS announced a ‘beautification project’ to improve the camp.
As Alice later discovered, the Nazis had told Kurt Gerron — one of Germany’s best-known screen directors — to make a propaganda film about the camp. To Gerron, himself a Jew, the Nazis gave their word that he and his family would be spared in return for his work. Naturally, the Gestapo didn’t want the camp to look overcrowded, so they rushed 7,503 older and sick prisoners to their deaths in Auschwitz.
At the same time, many of the 30,000 remaining inmates were ordered to change into the clothes of Jews who’d already been killed. Dress shoes for the orchestra, however, happened to be in short supply. But Gerron solved that problem by placing flowerpots around the edge of the stage, thus hiding the
Alice froze, afraid that she was about to be shot
musicians’ feet. As he started filming, many desperate inmates plastered beaming smiles on their faces in the hope that their lives would be spared.
But Gerron was determined to reveal the truth about the sham show camp. He knew it wouldn’t be easy, as SS officers followed him everywhere, barking orders, and he couldn’t risk deviating from the agreed script. Only when the film was eventually edited did it become evident what Gerron had done. Threaded between the shots of well-dressed inmates, disporting themselves with false jollity, were telling close-ups that exposed the painful reality. Even before the director had shot his final frame, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels had sent orders for Gerron to be singled out for what he called the ‘special treatment’.
He must have known his fate as soon as he was ordered onto a train, along with more than 2,000 of the inmates who’d participated in the production.
On arrival at Auschwitz, they all heard an SS guard shout through a loud hailer: ‘Kurt Gerron, get out!’
According to eyewitnesses at the camp, t he 47- year- old director marched, with his head held high, straight into the gas chamber.
Alice was still safe, but the moment she’d dreaded came in September that year, when her husband’s name appeared on a deportation list. Leopold sought out his wife the night before leaving and asked her to make a solemn vow. No matter what, she was told by the Gestapo, he said, she should never agree to leave the camp. Desperately trying to hold back her tears, she told him: ‘Yes, I promise.’
Leopold was sent to Auschwitz, and from there to Dachau. It was there, Alice later learned, that her husband had died.
A few months after he had left Theresienstadt, Alice’s promise to Leopald was tested when the SS invited women and children to join their husbands.
Many had received postcards — written at gunpoint while the men were still on the train — saying what a lovely time they were having in the brand new camp.
There was fierce competition for the 500 places on the next train to Auschwitz, but Alice chose to stay behind. The women and children who’d been duped were never seen again.
Her l i ttle boy, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly fearful. ‘Now that Papa’s gone, if they take you away I’ll be all alone in the world,’ he told her one day.
Assuring Stephan that she’d never leave him, Alice invented a stream of fairy tales to quell his anxiety.
‘I made up stories constantly,’ she recalled. ‘Never did I let my son see my
‘Never did I let my son see my fear or worry’
fear or worry, and tears had no place in a concentration camp. Laughter was our only medicine. But the hardest thing was to listen to my child cry from hunger and have nothing to give him.’ However by the end of October, most of the children, along with the majority of the artists and musicians, had been shipped to death camps.
When Theresienstadt was finally liberated by Russian tanks in May 1945, only 11 per cent of the 156,000 people who had passed through its gates had survived, and just 100 of the 15,000 Jewish children were still alive.
Alice returned to Prague. Several months later, she was tracked down by a survivor from Auschwitz who presented her with a battered tin spoon that had belonged to her husband.
Leopold, he t old her, had died from starvation and typhus. Alice treasured the spoon until her death.
After the war, she emigrated with Stephan to Israel, where she taught for many years at the Jerusalem Conservatory. In the Sixties and Seventies, she toured the world as piano accompanist to her son — by then a world-class cello player who went under his Hebrew name of Raphael.
And when he eventually became a cello professor at the Guildhall School of Music in London, Alice courageously uprooted herself at the age of 83 to move to England.
At 100, she was still taking the Tube across London to give piano lessons to gifted pupils.
And, until the age of 104, she attended philosophy classes three times a week. She even outlived her son, who died from an aneurysm in 2001.
To the very end of her life, Alice continued to find joy and solace in her piano music. But she believed she had given her finest performances in Theresienstadt — where music not only eased the terrible suffering of the inmates but undoubtedly saved her life in the end.