Alice Herz-Sommer, believed to be the oldest survivor of the Holocaust, died recently in London aged 110. Her survival is a herculean feat in itself. Her optimism and gratitude for her life is even more remarkable.
An accomplished pianist at age 39, Herz-Sommer was sent to Therezienstadt camp in 1943 and liberated by the Russians in 1945. When the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia she made a fateful decision to stay in Prague, with her son and husband, to care for her sick mother. Most of her family fled to Palestine.
In 1942 her 73-year-old mother was transported to Thereizin, then a few months later to Treblinka extermination camp. Herz-Sommer recalled, even in her final years, that acute despair:
This was the lowest point in my life. She was sent away. Till now I don't know where she was, till now I don't know when she died, nothing. When I went home from bringing her to this place I remember I had to stop in the middle of the street and I listened to a voice, an inner voice — Now, nobody can help you, not your husband, not your little child, not the doctor.
This must have been a time of huge emotional and spiritual devastation. In all the losses and trauma that Herz-Sommer recounts, this seems to have been a turning point. She returned home to play and master the difficult 24 etudes of Chopin. For up to eight hours a day, she was immersed in this task. Perhaps it was then, as she said in later interviews, that music became her religion, that it began to 'save [her] life'. Her entire family was musical and music was her 'language'.
Music did literally save her. When Herz-Sommer and her son Rafael were sent to Thereisenstadt camp in 1943, they survived as performers in musical shows. These shows were staged by the Nazis to exhibit to the world the humane conditions in the camp. She and other artists were to feature in a propaganda movie. It depicted the camp as civilised and cultured, a haven for the many cultured Jews of Prague.
Fake money for fake cafes and fake shops, and fake children's play grounds were set up to dissemble for the visits by the International Red Cross. In truth many Jews were starving, dying or being sent to the death camps. The world was shown a good place, while its macabre truth was hidden. It was displayed