By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO-You may have noticed in the newspaper this week that Alice Herz-Sommer, the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor, passed away. If you read further into her obituary, you would discover that this remarkable woman had a career as a pianist which spanned from the 1920s until her death. Nominated for an Oscar in the short documentary film category, The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life by director Malcolm Clarke recaps how her passion for life and music enabled her to survive Theresienstadt.
Born into an affluent cultured Jewish family in Prague, Alice’s artistic talent and temperament were nurtured by her parents and their circle of friends who included Franz Kafka, Gustav Mahler, and Artur Schnabel. In 1931 she married a violinist Leopold Sommer. Together they had a son Raphael Sommer who subsequently became a famous cellist.
Alice’s concert career was cut short by Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939. Even after the Germans confiscated her family’s grand piano, she continued to play on a piccolo piano hidden in her apartment. A Nazi official who lived in the same building thanked her for the comfort her music brought him. Her mother died in Treblinka, and her husband in Dachau.
The Germans deported Alice and her son Rafi to Theresienstadt in 1943. Her talent made her an attractive recruit for the camp’s orchestra. During her incarceration, she performed all the Chopin Etudes and played over 100 concerts. The sustenance derived from entertaining other inmates and finding a sanctuary in the music helped Alice preserve her will to live. She managed to stay with Rafi and buoy his spirits with her love and positive outlook which she summarizes in the film: “I knew that even in this very difficult situation, there are beautiful moments. …Even the bad is beautiful when you know where to look for it.”
Although the film focuses on Alice, two of her friends who also survived German camps, echo her sentiments. The actress Zdenka Fantlova asserts “Survival was in a nutshell a matter of your attitude to the situation.” Even when she lay among the dying and dead in Bergen-Belsen, she never could see herself as lifeless. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who played cello in the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz, lived according to her father’s dictum: “Put as much in your head because no one can take that away from you.” The music within her head and that she performed in the orchestra endowed her with sense of empowerment and transcendence.
After the war Alice and her son immigrated to Israel. Not much is mentioned in the film about this period of Alice’s life except that her son died suddenly at the age of 64 from an aneurism. Yet Alice reunited with her twin sister in Israel and became a teacher at the Jerusalem Academy of Music, She moved to London with Rafi when he decided to relocate there.
While you cannot avoid being inspired by Alice and friends, you should be careful about generalizing their responses to how other Holocaust survivors coped with their ordeal. Alice, Anita, and Zdenka possessed talent that their commandants did not want to waste if it could be exploited to create a semblance of normality, and even German benevolence among the prisoners, and, in the case of Theresienstadt, observers from the International Red Cross. These women had an extraordinary capacity to focus on the redeeming moments of what was an otherwise intolerable hell. Nevertheless, it was possible at any time for them to run afoul of a guard who spontaneously would lash out at them and snuff out their lives. They were always vulnerable. Far more Jews with useful skills and sunny dispositions perished in the camps or found the process of healing from the trauma inflicted on them debilitating and protracted.
I will be delighted if The Lady in Number 6 wins an Oscar, but much as I admire Alice’s optimism, I doubt there are few people in life who could emulate it if they underwent what she endured. There was no one path for endurance in the camps, ghettos, or in hiding, and, every survivor has struggled to reconstruct a life after such devastation. There is much middle ground between the tormented bitterness of Sol Nazerman in The Pawnbroker and the affirmative sanguinity of Alice Herz-Sommer.
The Lady in Number 6 and the other Oscar nominations for short documentary films are playing at the Ken Cinema this week.
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Baron is a professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University. He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com
There are many things that could be said about this film. I will simply say that it is unfortunate that our understanding of survivors tends to be divided between traumatized victims–guilty, ghostly, and afraid–and triumphant “celebrants of the human spirit.” Alice is the perfect person (at least as represented in the film) to stand for the second category. But most survivors, like most everyone else, are more complex and multi-faceted. It will be unfortunate if Alice’s unique story offers one more support to a two-dimensional caricature in lieu of engaging with the the actual people that survivors are–our brothers and sisters, no less complicated, engaging, and beloved.
Well, “The Lady in Number 6” did win an Oscar last night, though the person accepting had not a single word to say about the Holocaust.
I much appreciate that you mention other musicians who survived the German concentration camps and the fact that infinitely more talented people were murdered than survived. I also commend your last paragraph for its sensitive and accurate assessment of survival and its aftermath. As a survivor of six German concentration camps, I know exactly what you are talking about.
Peter Kubicek
Author of “Memories of Evil — Recalling a World War II Childhood”
Thank you for a good review and an interesting article. I was unaware of the film and will look for it.
Thanks again,
Eva