Alice Herz-Sommer, Who Found Peace in Chopin Amid Holocaust

Alice Herz-Sommer in her London apartment in 2012. Credit Yuri Dojc  

 

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.

 It won the Oscar, and the director gave a moving speech about her.

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.