In Tuesday’s (2/25) Guardian (United Kingdom), Maev Kennedy reports, “If a 38-minute documentary, The Lady in Number 6, wins an Oscar next weekend, it will stand as a fitting memorial to its subject, Alice Herz-Sommer. The oldest known survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, who has died aged 110, preferred all her long life to speak of the joy music brought her rather than the horrors she had witnessed in Theresienstadt.… Herz-Sommer was born in 1903 in Prague, into a prosperous, cultured and musical Moravian family. Her mother had been a childhood friend of the composer Gustav Mahler.… Her talent was recognised when she was only five … [and] by her mid-teens she herself was teaching and touring as a pianist. She married her musician husband, Leopold Sommer, a fortnight after meeting him in 1931, and they had one son, Raphael, who became a concert cellist.” At Theresienstadt, “Herz-Sommer’s music saved her life: she became a member of the camp orchestra, and played in more than 150 concerts.… Her husband died soon after being moved to Auschwitz and then Dachau in 1944, but her son, who also performed in children’s operas, was among 130 survivors of 15,000 children sent to the camp.… After the war she lived for many years in Israel, teaching and performing, but moved to London in 1986 with her son and his family. He died in 2001 while on a concert tour, aged 65. Herz-Sommer’s grandson, Ariel Sommer, said she died peacefully on Sunday morning.”
Posted February 26, 2014
