How music helped the actress to keep herself and her son alive during the Holocaust

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Music is an integral part of people's lives, for someone it passes in the background, for someone it becomes the meaning of life. For Alice Herz-Sommer, music was what gave her the strength to live and literally saved her and her son from death. If not for the music - Alice had no doubt about it - she would not have survived the Holocaust.

Alice Herz was born in Prague in 1903 to a family of German-speaking Jews. The family had five children, including Alice and her twin, Mariana. Alice recalls that as a child, famous people often visited their house: artists, composers, writers, including Franz Kafka, who regularly dined with them on Sundays.

Alisa's older sister Irma taught her to play the piano. Little Alice grasped everything on the fly, so her parents eventually invited her a teacher - it turned out to be Konrad Anzorge, a student of Franz Liszt. Music was given to the girl easily and this occupation captured her more and more every year. So she eventually entered the German Music Conservatory in Prague, where she was the youngest student at the time.

In 1931, Alice married musician and businessman Leopold Sommer, they had a son, Raphael. Alice managed to combine family and professional life - she regularly toured with concerts and became quite famous in central Europe. However, in 1938, when Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, everything changed.

Some of Alice's relatives managed to move to Palestine, but she herself was forced to stay with her ailing mother. When the deportation began, the Nazis took Alice's parents to Auschwitz, from where they never left. Alice's husband also ended up in a concentration camp - he died of typhus just a few weeks before his release.

Alice and her son ended up in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, located in the Czech Republic. During the war years, about 140 thousand people passed through this camp, of which 33 thousand died in it, and another 88 thousand were later deported to Auschwitz, where they also suffered death.

It is possible that Alice and her son also suffered the same fate, if not for her love of music and her ability to play. During her time in the concentration camp, she played more than a hundred concerts - for the guards, and for the "camp guests", and for the prisoners. “Three times a year, they came to the camp from the Red Cross,” Alice recalled. “The Germans wanted to show them that Jews live well here, so I played concerts every time during these visits. And it was magical. We [the prisoners] played in the hall in front of 150 old, unhappy, sick and hungry people. And these people lived by this music. This was their food. If they didn’t have this music, they would have died long ago. And we would die too."

Alice was allowed not to be separated from her son, and this saved him from death. More than 15 thousand children passed through Theresienstadt, of which only 130 survived. Alice tried to surround her son with care and distract him from the terrible reality with her stories and music. Later he will write that she managed to create for him "The Garden of Eden in the middle of hell" - he has surprisingly few bad memories of his childhood.

The Germans sent Jewish musicians to Theresienstadt on purpose to show the Red Cross and other visiting delegations. The prisoners were still poorly fed and harassed by hard work, tortured and abused psychologically, but at the same time they were given the opportunity to play musical instruments during their imprisonment.

In 1945, after the release of the prisoners from the camp, Alice returned with her son to Prague, but no one was waiting for them there - all her acquaintances, all her family that remained in the Czech Republic, all died, only Alice and her son Rafael remained.

On her return to Prague, Alice was asked to play a concert on the radio. Later, by complete coincidence, this very concert was broadcast to Israel, where Alice's twin sister lived. Mariana was able to get in touch with Alice and invited her to move to Israel, which she did. In the Czech Republic, nothing else kept her.

To feed herself and her son, Alice began to teach music. Her son also followed in his mother's footsteps and became a cellist. Later they all moved to England together. Alas, Raphael died in 2001 due to heart problems. And all that remained with Alice after that was just her music.

“Music saved my life, and it still gives me strength,” said Alice. "I am Jewish, but my religion is Beethoven." Being already elderly, having lost her son, having survived the Holocaust, Alice still continued to love life, looking at it through the prism of the beauty of music. “It seems to me that I already have a little left,” she said shortly before her death. - But it is not important. I had a wonderful life. Life itself is wonderful. And love is beautiful. Nature, music - everything is beautiful. All that we have is a gift that we need to appreciate, which is given to us in order to pass it with those we love."

“I went through so many wars and so many losses - I lost my husband, my mother, my beloved son. And still, I think life is beautiful. There are so many things in my life that you can still learn, what you can enjoy, that there is simply no time left for pessimism and hatred."

Alice died in 2014 at the age of 110.

In the same Theresienstadt concentration camp, where Alice was, there were Jews taken out of Denmark. Read about how a Danish Nazi and anti-Semite helped save Jews in their country during WWII. article about Georg Ferdinand Dukwitz.