Alice Herz-Sommer, the world's oldest known Holocaust survivor, passed away in London Sunday at age 110. Herz-Sommer was in the Czech concentration camp Theresienstadt from 1943 to 1945. Herz-Sommer was born in Prague on Nov. 26, 1903. Her sister began teaching her to play the piano when she was five. As a child she met Franz Kafka, who was a friend of her brother-in-law. In 1931, she married Leopold Sommer, and their son, Stephan, was born in 1937. During World War II, the family was among the 140,000 Czech Jews deported to Theresienstadt, 33,430 of whom died there. Some 88,000 were transferred to Auschwitz and other death camps, but Herz-Sommer and her son were among the 20,000 Jews who survived in Theresienstadt until the Red Army liberated it in May 1945. Her husband was transferred to Dachau and died there of typhus. The darkest period for Herz-Sommer was when she lost her 73-year-old mother, who was sent to the Treblinka death camp. "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," she said. She survived the camp by playing the piano. The documentary film "Lady in Number 6: How Music Saved My Life" tells the story of her life during the Holocaust, and has been nominated for an Oscar for the best short documentary. The film is directed by Malcolm Clarke. Despite her wretched situation, Herz-Sommer remembers herself "laughing all the time in the camp," as she put it in one interview. "These concerts, the people are sitting there, old people, desolated and ill, and they came to the concerts and this music was for them our food. Music was our food. Through making music we were kept alive," she said. Her then-6-year-old son even took part in an opera that was produced in the concentration camp to show visiting Red Cross representatives that conditions there were humane. "I was so happy because I knew my little boy was happy there," she said. One of the producers on Clarke's documentary, Nick Reed, said telling Herz-Sommer's story was "life-changing." "Even as her energy slowly diminished, her bright spirit never faltered," she said. "Her life force was so strong we could never imagine her not being around," Reed said.
Credit: Reuters
"This was a very hard time for the Jews. I didn't care because I loved being a mother," she said. "We were poor and we knew they'd send us to the camps and we knew that would be the end."
