Alice Herz-Sommer, 1903–2014

last updated 8 January 2015

As German soldiers were preparing to take her and her family to a concentration camp, Alice Herz-Sommer watched in horror as their Prague neighbors pounced on the clothes, art, and furniture they would leave behind. But one neighbor came not to take but to give encouragement. “I hope you will come back,” he said to the pianist. “I admire you and your playing.” The man was a Nazi, but as Herz-Sommer recalled years later, on that harrowing night, he was a human—“the only human.”

At age 110, Herz-Sommer was believed to be the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor when she died in London last week, said Ha’aretz (Israel). The world-class concert pianist’s unbending optimism came to symbolize the triumph of good over evil. Herz-Sommer was raised in a German-speaking Jewish family whose home was a “cultural salon,” where Prague musicians and writers, including Franz Kafka, often congregated. As a 16-year-old, she was the youngest student at the German music academy, and soon became one of the city’s most famous pianists. In 1943, she was taken with her husband and young son to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where the Nazis imprisoned many artists, exploiting their talents through plays and concerts in a propaganda effort to convince the world that inmates were treated humanely. Performances coincided with Red Cross inspections, Herz-Sommer recalled, but the effect went beyond propaganda to give comfort to the prisoners. “They lived for the music,” she said. “It was like food to them.”

After the camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945, Herz-Sommer moved to Palestine and was reunited with surviving family, said The Guardian (U.K.). She later moved to London to be with her son, Raphael Sommer, himself an accomplished cellist. Her extraordinary life is the subject of a documentary, The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life, which is under consideration for an Oscar this year. When asked about the secret of her longevity, she answered with a word: optimism. “The world is full of beauty,” she said. “I know about the bad things, but I look only for the good things.”