Alice's Piano

by Melissa Müller

  Mother and daughter walked down the street arm in arm. Few words passed between them. Alice carried the heavy rucksack and when she reached the collection point she draped it over her mother’s shoulders. They stood among hundreds of mostly elderly people who had obeyed the call and fumbled for words of encouragement, which they had difficulty in finding.

  It was over seven months since the first trainful of deportees had left Prague for Theresienstadt on 24 November 1941, to be followed by regular transports to the camp; not just from the Protectorate, but also from Germany, Austria, the so-called Sudetengau, Holland, Denmark, Slovakia and Hungary. The timetable and number of passengers were worked out in Adolf Eichmann’s “Jewish Section” in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt* in Berlin. The Jewish communities themselves decided who was to go.

  Leopold Sommer must have known what lay ahead for his mother-in-law, since by then he was working for the “organization” of the Jewish community.5 One of his several jobs was to draw up the lists for deportation. He never spoke to Alice about it and she never asked him. They both made every effort to protect their son and she was glad that Leopold was bringing money home regularly, if only in modest quantities. Nonetheless she constantly tried to prepare herself for the fact that when Leopold had finished his work they too would be placed on a transport and deported from Prague.

  In the agonies of parting, Alice quickly pressed her mother to her breast. Sofie said goodbye in her own way: “Give my love to Marianne.”

  On 13 July 1942 Sofie Herz was deported to Theresienstadt. On 19 October the same year she was moved to the extermination camp at Treblinka. All trace of her has been lost.

  * * *

  THE NEXT few days were the nadir of Alice’s existence. She was now thirty-nine. She could not sleep or eat; she could not think clearly. Physically she was allowing herself to go to pieces. No one could bring her out of the depths of her despair; not her little boy, not her loving husband, not the trusted family doctor. Even her beloved piano, which for three decades had been the source of her strength and confidence, was now standing cold and silent in the flat. Alice could not play.

  Leopold took Alice to see a specialist, but even he could only tell Alice that she needed time. The next day she was wandering aimless and depressed through Prague’s streets when suddenly an inner voice spoke to her: “Practice the 24 Études, they will save you!”

  Frédéric Chopin’s work was famed as the perfect combination of great virtuosity with musical genius. Alice had always been familiar with it. The ability to master all of the 24 Études and then to perform them on stage was, in her opinion, a proof of the highest achievement and seemed for her personally quite unthinkable. Even the most famous Chopin-interpreter of the twentieth century, Arthur Rubinstein, fought shy of performing them all his life; indeed, as he once let it be known, they struck fear in him.6 “In the end I had performed pretty well the entire corpus of Chopin’s works, with the exception of the Études. I had played many of them in concerts, but there were some I always left out, because I didn’t think I had them right.”7 In truth many of the Études border on being unplayable.

  After graduating from the Music Academy, Alice had gone to a concert performance of the Études with Václav Štěpán. Alice was amazed by the American pianist Alexander Brailowsky’s performance, and she was shocked too: “I will never attain this level,” she told Štěpán. “I think it would be best to forget about my hoping to become a concert pianist. I should give up straightaway.”

  Initially Štěpán had reprimanded her; then he appealed to her conscience. It was not important to become the world’s best; the most important thing was to be able to play the piano for your own pleasure. “And when you can make yourself happy, you will make others happy too.”

  The 24 Études became the life raft on which—by her own strength and by the power of music—she was able to save herself from the wreck of despair. She began practicing immediately and, after a few weeks battling the most difficult cycle ever written for the piano, she had regained her inner balance. Every day she made progress, and with each step forward her strength grew; precisely because she was constantly playing to the limits of her abilities, mental and physical. The circumstances under which Alice played brought her life into danger. A while ago the Jews had been required to hand over their musical instruments and her Förster grand had been confiscated. The SS men, however, had overlooked her piccolo piano and, although such oversights carried the death penalty, Alice had not owned up. It was also strictly forbidden for Jews to play. Even the Sommers’ regular house concerts were now illegal.

  Every Sunday afternoon Alice and Leopold assembled as many as twenty music-loving friends in their drawing room. Chamber music or the piano was played, or there was singing to a piano accompaniment. Stephan sat with the adults for hours on end, listening open-mouthed. Once, when a newcomer to the circle was introduced to him as “Gustav” the five-year-old sprang to his feet and asked “Gustav Mahler?” One of the regular guests at the house concerts was the composer Viktor Ullmann, a pupil of Arnold Schönberg. Alice particularly valued his savoir-vivre (he always kissed the ladies’ hands) and extraordinary knowledge. On 8 September 1942 Ullmann was deported to Theresienstadt.

  Not long after that, when Alice was playing, there was suddenly a loud and sustained banging on the drawing-room ceiling. A German officer and his family had been billeted on the floor above. Had her playing disturbed the officer? Was he going to report her? Alice was so terrified that she didn’t play another note all day. Until, that is, the caretaker’s wife came up and gave her confidence to sit down at the piano again: “Herr Herman who lives upstairs from you likes your music so much and he is really sad that you have stopped. He had been led to believe that you had already been sent away.”

  * * *

  OVER THE course of the following year, Alice learned all of the 24 Études to concert-performance level. The first one she tackled was the C minor Étude, the so-called “Revolutionary Study.” The deadly menace and rebellion in the music can easily be explained by the circumstances of its creation. In September 1831, when Chopin wrote it, he must have been in a mood similar to Alice’s after she bade farewell to her mother. He was living in Stuttgart at the time, and it was there that he learned that the Russian army had suppressed the Warsaw Uprising.

  Chopin was as introverted as he was distinguished, and unable to express his feelings except through music. He committed his thoughts about the fate of Warsaw and his family to paper only once, in the diary that musicologists refer to as the “Stuttgart Sketches”:

  Where are you mother, father, my brothers and sisters? Are you still alive? […] The outlying districts have been destroyed, burned to ashes and Jeannot and Wilus most certainly perished on the barricades. Oh God, are you still there? Will you not avenge us? Have there not been enough outrages? Father, dear Father, are you starving, maybe you cannot buy bread for Mother? My sisters, have the soldiers slaughtered you in their fury? Mother, if you have survived your daughter [Emilia] you must make sure that her grave is not defiled … And what is happening to her? Where is the poor girl? Perhaps she is in the hands of the Muscovites? Are they murdering, strangling or killing them? I am idle here. Sometimes I sigh and confide my sighs and despair to my piano. Oh God, destroy this world …

  Chopin translated all his passionate rage, his crippling pain, and his burning hopes into music when he wrote the “Revolutionary Study.” Alice, too, was spurred to attempt the Études by the pain of loss, and by doing so she transformed impotence into protest from the very first. It was her own way of resisting the Nazis and preventing them from depriving her of her dignity.

  * * *

  THE TIME came when the Sommers were told that on 3 July 1943 Alice, Leopold and Stephan Sommer were “to leave on a transport.” The Protectorate was almost “free of Jews” and the administrative work of the Jewish Community office was to be wound up. Most of its staff would be deported with the Sommers. In the past
Leopold had never troubled his wife with details of his work, and certainly he had never mentioned his crises of conscience or the worries that tormented him. When they took him on they made it clear to him that the Jewish Community had no other choice than to follow the dictates of the SS.

  At the beginning of June 1943 Leopold had to prepare Alice for deportation. There were various forms to fill in before the journey, and above all the new situation had to be gradually explained to Stephan. He was coming up to his sixth birthday but Alice decided to postpone his party until a “better time.” She carefully explained to her son that in a few days the family would be giving up their flat and that they would be moving to the ghetto in Theresienstadt. Stephan’s subsequent questions and her attempts to answer them only led to increasing doubt.

  “Why can’t we stay in our flat: it is so nice?” “Why do all the Jews have to leave Prague?” “What are Jews anyway?” “When can we come back?” “War? Who’s at war? When is it finally going to end?”

  Alice tried to comfort him. “We are coming with you, my love. In a few weeks, possibly a few months, we will be able to come home again.”

  Alice took infinite pains to involve the child in the preparations for the journey. She made him a special shoulder bag. He helped her to sew the prescribed numbers onto the rucksacks and nametags onto blankets and articles of clothing. Together they collected utensils, tin knives and forks and three pocket knives. Stephan had his own water bottle, tin bowl, mug and pocket knife, which he found really exciting. A few days in advance they rehearsed the packing of their rucksacks. They had to have a warm blanket each, as well as underwear, a pullover, bed-linen, ear-muffs and gloves and enough food for five days.

  “Daddy said that it will only be a few days before our train is ready,” said Alice. Once again she put the rucksack on the scales, unpacked it and packed it again, as there was no question of exceeding the maximum weight.

  The night before their deportation neither Alice nor Leopold could sleep, but Stephan slept in the next room until it was time to leave. At four in the morning the caretaker’s wife suddenly burst into the flat and scrutinized the few remaining objects of value. She looked straight through Alice and Leopold, then she disappeared again. A short while later she returned followed by several neighbors. They dragged off anything they could move: pictures, carpets and furniture, fighting over the best bits.

  “Just look at them, Leopold, how like vultures they are,” Alice whispered and held her husband’s hand. “It is unbelievable.”

  “I think,” said Leopold in resignation, “that for them we are already dead.”

  SEVEN

  Theresienstadt

  “Maminko, why can’t we go home…”

  “MY DEAR, good miracle-rabbi; please, please help me, so that my mother comes home this week as normal and is not sent on the transport. Thank you. Your Dita.” This note written in a childish hand was found in 1946 at the opening of a collection box at the grave of the famous Rabbi Löw in the old Prague Jewish Cemetery.1 It is a reflection of the fear that presaged the receipt of the deportation order. Between October 1941 and March 1945, 46,067 Prague Jews were torn away from their homes.2

  The “transport” led the Jews into a sinister future in either the Theresienstadt ghetto or in one of the concentration camps in the east. The word “transport” was in itself enough to inspire fear, for many of those affected already knew that it stood for the breaking of all previous bonds and the loss of all possessions.

  When he had gone to work for the administration of the Jewish Community Organization in 1942, Leopold had known that as soon as he had completed the job he and his family would also be dispatched to Theresienstadt. A few weeks before their deportation Otto Zucker, a leading member of the Autonomous Jewish Administration in Theresienstadt, had sent word to Alice that soon after her arrival in the ghetto she could be giving her first piano recital. This consoled her somewhat as they got ready to leave. “If they can organize concerts there,” Alice said to Leopold, “it can’t be such a terrible place.”

  In the early hours of the morning of 5 July 1943 the Sommers had to be ready to stand on parade in the Exhibition Hall, which was guarded by the Czech police. The sky was heavily overcast and it was drizzling. Stephan was too tired to ask questions. He trotted sleepily between his mother and father down the street. The three of them with their heavy rucksacks looked rather like a family setting out for a holiday in the mountains, wearing warm clothes and sensible shoes. The three rucksacks were counted as “hand luggage.” The main luggage—what they were allowed to ship—had been fetched a week before. Everyone was allowed to take fifty kilos, reckoned as two middle-sized, fully packed suitcases.

  The Jewish Community Organization in Prague was obliged to work closely with the Autonomous Jewish Administration in Theresienstadt. Leopold was fully aware of what was waiting for him and his family in the ghetto, and he had told Alice to carefully plan the contents of the “hand luggage” and to put in absolutely everything that was necessary for survival. He had been informed that for some time the SS had been impounding the main luggage and leaving the prisoners with just their hand luggage.3 For that reason Leopold, Alice and Stephan’s rucksacks were bigger and heavier than most of the other prisoners.”

  At the “assembly point” in the Exhibition Hall Leopold pulled three bits of cardboard threaded with string from his shoulder bag. They bore the transport and prisoner numbers. Around Stephan’s neck he hung the card DE 164 and around his own, number DE 162. Alice’s number was DE 163.

  Alice caught sight of dozens of lavatories separated only by wooden partitions. Here you were obliged to respond to the call of nature outdoors, and in full view of those present. “That can’t be right,” Alice murmured. “They want to strip us of our dignity.” It was the first shock. The second followed immediately after they entered the building.

  The hall was a wooden exhibition shack, gloomy, ramshackle and unheated. Rain seeped through the ceiling. Alice, Leopold and Stephan stood in a long queue which had formed before the “registry.” This consisted of five tables behind which officials from the Jewish Community Organization were sitting dealing with bureaucratic formalities under the watchful eyes of SS guards. The men knew Leopold; they had worked together for several months. They all knew that they too would end up being deported to Theresienstadt and were particularly friendly to Alice and her son. But Stephan was not to be distracted either by kind gestures or jokes. He stared rigidly at the people around him who sat or lay dejectedly on straw sacks. Many of them were in tears. The lad pulled his mother close.

  “Mama,” he whispered in her ear in German, “let’s turn round. I want to go home.”

  “Stepanku,” Alice replied in Czech, “I am afraid we can’t do that.”

  The six-year-old switched effortlessly into Czech. “Maminka, who is forbidding us from going home?”

  Alice discreetly indicated two SS men standing nearby: “Those ones, there in the black uniforms.”

  Stephan would not let go: “Please ask them why we can’t go home—we haven’t done anything naughty.”

  “Stephan, it is forbidden to ask questions. They will punish us straightaway if we ask them.”

  Stephan was clearly finding it hard to understand this harsh new world, but how could he?

  She embraced him tenderly. “In a few weeks maybe it will all be over. Until then we must make sure that we never lose one another. And we are going to speak only Czech from now on. Do you hear that, Stepanku? That way, at least they won’t understand what we’re saying.”

  They were allocated beds 162, 163 and 164. They would have to spend the next few nights lying on these filthy, worn-out, dusty straw-filled sacks. Leopold, Alice and Stephan took their rucksacks over to their bedding before reporting to the first of the five registry tables when their numbers were called out. There the key to their flat was given the code DE 162–164 and confiscated. This happened comparatively quickly, but at the second
table the queue had come to a standstill. This was where permanent food cards were issued and the remainder of the ration cards for potatoes, eggs and soap had to be handed back.4 Papers were minutely examined to see that they had been filled in correctly and that the coupons had been used as intended. It led to ugly scenes and even beatings. The queue became longer and longer and there was no thought given to the children, the old, the sick or the frail who were standing in line. Alice, Leopold and Stephan queued for over four hours before their cases were dealt with.

  At the third table they had to hand in a “declaration of possessions.” This was an eight-page questionnaire which they had received a week before the date of their transportation and which had to be painstakingly filled out for every member of the family.5 At this table, too, people waited for hours, as every questionnaire had to be minutely examined. Stephan watched silently as people were made to count out and to hand in their remaining cash. Most of them had little money on them, but a few had wallets filled with notes. One man counted out all his money from a shoe box. The humiliating business had already lasted more than five hours. Stephan occasionally rested on a portable folding chair which Leopold had had the foresight to bring with him. At last, like all the other future residents of the ghetto, it was Alice and Leopold’s turn to sign the declaration. All their savings were appropriated in the interests of “emigration funds.” Needless to say the process had been “voluntary.”

  As the hours dragged by, more and more people lost their tempers. There were anxiety attacks, bouts of hysteria and fits of tears. Stephan felt increasingly insecure and only perked up when the evening meal was served. It was bread and soup; and pretty basic too, but in the circumstances it was more nourishing than Alice had expected.