Alice Herz-Sommer, the oldest known survivor of the Holocaust, died at 110 on Feb. 23, 2014. Her death comes a week 86th Academy Awards, at which a film about her life is nominated for best short documentary.
Alice Herz-Sommer used to perform on the piano for fellow prisoners at the Nazi concentration camp where she spent nearly two years of her life. It was the music that saved her life in those dark days, she said.
Herz-Sommer, the oldest known survivor of the Holocaust, died at 110 on Sunday. Her death comes a week ahead of the 86th Academy Awards, at which a biographic film called The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life, is nominated for best short documentary.
Herz-Sommer’s daughter-in-law, Genevieve Sommer, who said the supercentenarian was admitted to a London hospital on Friday and passed away on Sunday, the Associated Press reported.
I think I am in my last days, but it doesn’t really matter because I have had such a beautiful life,” reads a quote from Herz-Sommer on her biopic’s website.
A Bohemian in the true sense of the word, Herz-Sommer was born in Prague on Nov. 26, 1903. Growing up, she learned piano from her sister and became acquainted with the author Franz Kafka, a family friend.
In 1943, Herz-Sommer and her 6-year-old son Raphael were sent to Theresienstadt, a German concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. The camp is described in The Lady In Number 6 as a precursor to Auschwitz, “where Jewish celebrities and intellectuals were used by the Nazi’s for propaganda purposes.”
The Nazis filmed prisoners giving concerts at the camp and used the footage as supposed proof that the detainees were being treated humanely. As a prisoner in Theresienstadt until the Soviets liberated it in May 1945, Herz-Sommer played more than 100 piano concerts, performing all of Frédéric Chopin’s études from memory. Her son sang in the children’s opera Brundibár, according to the film.
“I felt that [music] is the only thing which helps me to have hope,” Herz-Sommer said in the film. “It’s a sort of religion actually — music is god.”
Prior to Herz-Sommer’s detainment, her husband, Leopold Sommer, and her mother were sent to Nazi camps, where they both died..
Herz-Sommer and her son went back to Prague after the 1945 liberation, but they soon moved to Israel in search of other survivors.
Raphael Sommer became an accomplished cellist; he lived in England with his wife and two children. Before her 100th birthday, Herz-Sommer moved from to England from Israel, where she had been teaching music, in order to be near her son and grandchildren. Raphael Sommer died of an aneurysm at age 64 in 2001.
Herz-Sommer continued to play the piano until the time of her death. You can watch Herz-Sommer tell her own story and describe her love of music in the preview for The Lady In Number 6 below.
I think I am in my last days, but it doesn’t really matter because I have had such a beautiful life
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