A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World's Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor Read online

  Alice Herz, Prague, circa 1924

  Copyright © 2012 by Caroline Stoessinger

  Foreword copyright © 2012 by the Estate of Vaclav Havel All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Photographs, excluding the frontispiece, are by Yuri Dojc and are reprinted by permission of the photographer.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stoessinger, Caroline.

  A century of wisdom: lessons from the life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the world’s oldest living Holocaust survivor / Caroline Stoessinger.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-64401-9

  1. Herz-Sommer, Alice, 1903– 2. Jews—Czech Republic—Prague—

  Biography. 3. Women pianists—Biography. 4. Theresienstadt

  (Concentration camp). 5. Holocaust survivors—Israel—Biography. 6.

  Holocaust survivors—England—London—Biography. 7. Prague (Czech

  Republic)—Biography. I. Title.

  DS135.C97H488 2012

  940.53′18092—dc23 [B] 2011035168

  www.spiegelandgrau.com

  v3.1

  No longer forward nor behind

  I look in hope or fear,

  But, grateful, take the good I find,

  The best of now and here.

  —John Greenleaf Whittier, 1859

  FOREWORD

  Václav Havel

  A Century of Wisdom is a deeply moving account of the epic journey of one woman who has crossed decades and national borders to defy death and to inspire us all. Set against both the beauty of our Central European culture and the tragic events of the twentieth century that shut Czechoslovakia off from the rest of the world for nearly fifty years, Alice Herz-Sommer’s life illustrates a deep ethical and spiritual strength. Her memories are our memories. Through her suffering we recall our darkest hours. Through her example we rise to find the best in ourselves.

  At 108 years old, Alice enjoys telling stories from the lives of great thinkers—from Gustav Mahler to Sigmund Freud and Viktor Frankl, from Martin Buber to Leo Baeck—who have left an indelible impression. With her music—as a concert pianist and as a teacher—she has influenced countless students, their children, and their children’s children, just as she comforted her fellow inmates in the Theresienstadt concentration camp with her talents. Since the war, Alice has been equal parts teacher and student; she has spent the balance of her life in untiring pursuit of knowledge and understanding of who we are as humans, as a community, and as individuals.

  Alice has said, “I never give up hope.” This sentiment resonates strongly with me, for I believe that hope is related to the very feeling that life has meaning, and as long as we feel that it does, we have a reason to live. Alice’s irrepressible optimism inspires me. She has survived, I believe, so that the world may know her story, our story, of truth and beauty in the face of evil. Not only can we learn from Alice today but future generations can take wisdom and hope from her richly textured life.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Foreword by Václav Havel

  Prelude

  ONE Alice and Franz Kafka

  Interlude: An Emerald Ring

  TWO A Tolerant Heart

  THREE Peeling Potatoes

  Interlude: Dreaming

  FOUR Piano Lessons

  Interlude: Fire

  FIVE Starting Over

  SIX The Tin Spoon

  SEVEN Never Too Old

  Interlude: Chicken Soup

  EIGHT Music Was Our Food

  NINE The Führer Gives the Jews a City

  TEN Snapshots

  Interlude: Old Age

  ELEVEN Man in the Glass Booth

  TWELVE No Harsh Words

  THIRTEEN First Flight

  FOURTEEN Alice the Teacher

  Interlude: The Lady in Number Six

  FIFTEEN Circle of Friends

  Coda: Alice Today

  In Alice’s Words

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  PRELUDE

  At 108 years old, Alice is the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor, as well as the world’s oldest concert pianist. An eyewitness to the entire last century and the first decade of this one, she has seen it all—the best and the worst of mankind. She has lived her life against a backdrop of good amid the chaos of evil, yet she continues to throw her head back in laughter with the same optimism she had as a child.

  Despite her years of imprisonment in the Theresienstadt concentration camp and the murders of her mother, husband, and friends at the hands of the Nazis, Alice is victorious in her ability to move on and to live each day in the present. She has wasted no time on bitterness toward her oppressors and the executioners of her family. Aware that hatred eats the soul of the hater rather than the hated, Alice reasons, “I am still grateful for life. Life is a present.” A Century of Wisdom tells of one woman’s lifelong determination—in the face of some of the worst ills and heartaches—to bring good to the world. In Alice’s story we can find lessons for our own twenty-first-century lives. This is Alice’s gift to us.

  Her name, Herz-Sommer, means “heart of summer,” although she was born on a bitterly cold day, November 26, 1903, in Prague. Her parents, Friedrich and Sofie Herz, called her Alice, which means “of the noble kind.” Her father was a successful merchant, and her mother was highly educated and moved in circles of well-known artists and writers that included Gustav Mahler, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, and Franz Kafka.

  Alice grew up in a secure and peaceful environment, in which reading and concertgoing were the major forms of entertainment; neighbors would help one another in times of sickness; and families could calculate their interest and retirement for many years to come. Before World War II, Alice was well on her way to a distinguished career as a concert pianist. Her mother’s profound love and deep knowledge of music as well as her friendship with Mahler provided Alice with inspiration, and she decided to become a pianist at an early age. Alice remembers accompanying her mother by train to Vienna two days before her fourth birthday to hear Mahler conduct the farewell performance of his Second Symphony with the Hofoper Orchestra on November 24, 1907. Alice said that after the concert her mother talked with the composer, and then “I spoke a little bit with Gustav Mahler.” Alice tucks in her lips and raises her shoulders in her expression of wonder at that moment in the presence of genius. Most likely Alice was with her mother when Sofie, together with Arnold Schoenberg, stood in the crowd at the railroad station to wave as Mahler’s train slowly left Vienna the morning after the concert.

  Years later, after auditioning for Artur Schnabel, she was convinced that a career as a pianist was within her reach. Frequently she was the featured piano soloist with the Czech Philharmonic, and she completed a number of commercial recordings, receiving glowing reviews in Prager Tagblatt, the German paper in Prague, from Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and biographer.

  But the world around Alice had gone mad. Czech laws were abolished. The city was deluged with Nazi flags. Alice snapped a photograph of her three-year-old child standing in front of a sign that read JUDEN EINTRITT V
ERBOTEN (Jews are forbidden to enter) and barred his entrance from his favorite park. After the Anschluss, in March 1938, Alice’s sisters and their families began making frantic preparations to immigrate to Palestine; Alice and her husband chose to stay behind with their young son to care for her aging mother, who would be one of the first to be sent to Theresienstadt. Instinctively Alice understood that she would never see her mother again as she watched her trudge with her heavy rucksack into an enormous building the Nazis had confiscated to use for a human collection center. “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also,” Heinrich Heine had cautioned a century earlier. Still, most people did not believe the dire predictions.

  By early 1939, remnants of Czechoslovakia’s army and government, along with the country’s president, Edvard Beneš, had fled to England, where trainloads of children wearing name tags had been shipped to live with strangers. All doors to the democratic world were slamming shut. The British Embassy was closing, and the Americans, too, would be leaving. Nazi soldiers equipped with machine guns patrolled the streets. The last train headed for London, packed with more than three hundred Jewish children, never left the station; most of those children disappeared forever.

  In July 1943, Alice and her husband, the businessman and amateur violinist Leopold Sommer, and their six-year-old son, Raphaël, or “Rafi,” were notified that they too were being deported to Theresienstadt. Alice had hoped she would find her mother there, but Sofie had already been sent on farther east, most likely to Treblinka.

  Theresienstadt was no ordinary concentration camp. From the outside it looked like a very crowded small city where thousands rushed around and music often could be heard: it was Hitler’s propaganda machine at work. The Führer had touted Theresienstadt as the place where distinguished Jewish musicians, writers, artists, and the elderly would be protected from the war. The truth was that the camp was a heavily guarded ghetto, a transit station to Auschwitz and other Nazi killing fields throughout eastern Europe. Inside the walls, the gifted and the intelligentsia from Czechoslovakia, Austria, Holland, Denmark, and Germany suffered from constant hunger, cold, infectious diseases, torture, and death. Of the 156,000 Jews imprisoned in Theresienstadt, a mere 17,500 would survive. Between 1942 and 1945, more than 15,000 Jewish children were rounded up and shipped to Theresienstadt. Approximately 100 survived, among them Rafi.

  Nevertheless, unlike in the other camps, there was a patina of normal life in Theresienstadt. Despite the terror and deprivation, musicians practiced, actors performed, professors gave lectures, artists drew on scraps of paper, and friends even exchanged jokes. Eventually the Nazis ordered performances for propaganda purposes. What they did not realize was that these concerts would help both listeners and performers to survive.

  And so it was for Alice Herz-Sommer, who played more than one hundred programs for her fellow inmates and secretly managed to give piano lessons to children in the camp.

  • • •

  When the Soviet Army liberated Theresienstadt, on May 8, 1945, Alice and Rafi returned to Prague only to discover strangers living in their apartment. Having few resources and finding almost no one from her past, Alice made the decision in 1949 to immigrate to Israel, where she would reunite with her sisters and their families as well as with friends, including Max Brod. She went on to form a new life, and at forty-five years of age, Alice learned Hebrew. She supported herself and Rafi by teaching at the Conservatory of the Jerusalem Academy of Music (later renamed the Rubin Academy of Music), but although she continued to perform in Israel and later, infrequently, in Europe, Alice never revived her international career. The lost years in the concentration camp combined with her need to earn money and to care for her son consumed her time and energy.

  Rafi grew up to be a successful cellist, and at eighty-three years old, Alice traded countries once again, immigrating to London to be near her son. Her greatest heartbreak came a few years later, with his sudden death at the age of sixty-five.

  I first met Alice in her home in London when I began working on a documentary film about her life. For years I had been absorbed in music of the Holocaust and particularly music in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, where my husband had lost his grandparents. How could anyone play concerts or write music under such conditions? I had heard about Alice from other Theresienstadt survivors and from long talks with Joža Karas, a Czech émigré musician who had conducted many hours of taped interviews with Alice in the 1970s.

  In response to the 9/11 tragedy, Alice said to me, “Of course it was terrible, but why are you so shocked? Good and evil have been around since prehistoric times. It is how we handle it, how we respond, that is important.” Alice laughed—disconcerting as it was to me in that moment, I would soon discover that particular laugh was her way of emphasizing the importance of her words. Gently scolding me she continued, “Isn’t this wonderful? You took a plane and came to London in only a few hours. We can sit together and talk. We are alive. We have music. You are rich like me because you are a pianist. No one can ever destroy this fortune.” Then she reminded me of something Leonard Bernstein said after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. “This is our answer to violence, we will make music more beautifully, urgently, and more passionately than ever before.”

  Even though she has not performed publicly for the past quarter of a century, Alice remains true to her commitment, practicing Bach and Beethoven, Chopin and Schubert—all from memory—at least three hours daily. She frequently plays chamber music in her home in the evenings with professionals who stop by to visit her. Alice switches languages easily and fluently. While German was her first language and Czech her second, she is articulate in English, French, and Hebrew.

  Alice lives alone, but she is not lonely. She has everything and nothing—everything spiritual, but nothing material. The bank account of her mind is priceless. Her material possessions include only very old clothes, an antique television and well-used video player, a few photographs, and her indispensable upright piano.

  While her face is lined and marred with age spots from years in the Jerusalem sun, Alice’s smile is her most noticeable physical characteristic. Generated from somewhere inside her, it radiates and explodes into warm and welcoming mirth. Alice’s laughter is at once inquisitive and nonjudgmental. It reflects a world of memories colored with the love that comes from her years of understanding.

  She exercises daily by taking long walks, moving slowly and cautiously in sneakers to avoid falls; she shuns both a walker and a hearing aid. Until recently Alice was studying history and philosophy at the University of the Third Age. She admits that all this “seems like a miracle.”

  A Century of Wisdom is based on Alice’s memories as related to me in countless hours of conversations and filmed interviews from 2004 to 2011. To know Alice is to see the world anew through the eyes of a woman who has lived for more than a century. Persistently independent today, Alice is supremely optimistic at an age far exceeding the norm. Her curiosity and emotional energy inspire all who have the good fortune to meet her. A student of philosophy, she has practiced what the philosophers taught. Particularly important to her is the ancient Greek stoic Epictetus, who wrote, “He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.”

  I have learned a great deal from Alice, who sees our human frailties and triumphs with equanimity and unique clarity from her vantage point of advanced age. The optimism and profound humanistic values she learned as a child, which govern the rhythm of her being, have never forsaken her in more than a century. Her story could be our textbook for living a far richer life. Surely it is the key to staying young.

  ONE

  Alice and Franz Kafka

  As she unlatched the garden gate, eight-year-old Alice caught her first glimpse of a tall, very thin young man who, many years later, would be known as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Franz Kafka was Uncle Franz to Alice. He had arrived in a horse-drawn
cart with a little bunch of multicolored flowers for her mother. As the flowers wilted in the sun, Kafka stopped to feed the horse apples that had fallen to the ground. “Poor Franz,” Alice reminisces. “He apologized for the flowers. But not because of their sad state but because there were so many different colors. He said he just couldn’t decide which color to choose.”

  Alice had two older brothers, Georg and Paul, and two sisters, Irma, who was twelve years older than Alice, and Marianne, nicknamed Mitzi, who was Alice’s twin. Irma had become engaged to Felix “Fritz” Weltsch, an outgoing young philosopher who had met Kafka when they both were studying law at Charles University. Rejecting law as their profession, they became fast friends when they worked together in the same insurance firm. Away from work Weltsch pursued a second doctorate in philosophy, while Kafka wrote and began to publish, and together with Max Brod and Oscar Baum they formed a writers’ group, the “Prague Four.” Later they befriended a teenage poet, Franz Werfel.

  It was only natural that Weltsch would invite his best friend to meet his future in-laws. “He very often came to our house,” Alice explains. Kafka felt so at ease in the Herzs’ literary and musical home that he became a regular at their Sunday table. “He was [like] a member of our family,” Alice says. Struggling with his Jewish identity, he found the warmth of their secular German Jewish life reassuring. Throughout his life Kafka settled on a kind of middle road with regard to his Jewish heritage, living by Jewish values, without adherence—other than his Bar Mitzvah—to organized religious traditions. He presented himself to the world and to his friends as a member of the European bourgeoisie, impeccably mannered and properly dressed. It is nearly impossible to find a photograph of Kafka casually clothed. As a child Alice thought it was strange that Franz always looked dressed for the office even on outings or picnics.

  Observant Alice was quick to analyze and accept Kafka’s ways. He could be depended on to be late, to forget something, and even to lose his way—and then he would arrive apologizing for all of the above. He was so apologetic that it felt to Alice as if he were apologizing for the food he ate or even for simply being alive. But once he got past this, he was a lot of fun, and very responsible with children. In summers Kafka, who was fond of swimming, would organize parties under the Charles Bridge. Alice and Mitzi were often invited, along with Irma and her fiancé. Long before she met Kafka, Alice had become a superb swimmer and had no difficulty racing across the Vltava River.