Alice's Piano

by Melissa Müller

  The final composition of the transport was put together by a “commission,” which was appointed by the Council of Elders, and each of the sections of the Autonomous Jewish Administration was more or less equally represented. On the days the commission met there was frantic activity on the staircase of building B5, where the chancellery was housed, as once the list was made known it could become a death sentence.17 Many people appealed to the commission, giving reasons why their names should be struck from the list.

  All the sections produced lists in four categories: indispensable, relatively indispensable, relatively dispensable and dispensable. A strict “transport protection” was only applied to two small groups in the camp: to some of the “celebrities” who were chosen for various reasons but generally because the SS showed a special interest in them. The artists affiliated with the Free Time Organization were exempted in this way. Around 120 people fell into this category—a pathetically small number 18 who would be spared the gas chambers. Alice was one of them. Leopold Sommer was not. Also protected were the members of the Council of Elders and those who enjoyed a similar status as members of the Autonomous Jewish Authority. These two privileged groups had the right to draw up their own lists of people to be protected. They were limited to thirty people, but on some of their lists there were up to seventy names.19

  The SS Commandant Anton Burger exploited the situation to clear the camp of people he disliked. He also had many of those who had been brought in to construct the camp deported although they had been promised that they would be ineligible for deportation. As Burger feared that there might be resistance on the part of the Jewish ghetto guards, he ordered that the majority of them be transported too. On one day alone, 6 September 1943, 5,007 prisoners left the camp including 327 children under fifteen. Of these only 37 survived.20 But for the time being, Leopold, Alice and Stephan had been spared.

  * * *

  THREE WEEKS later, the mood in the camp was lifted by the first performance of Brundibár. Rehearsals had continued even during the ghastly period which preceded the transport to the east. Stephan often returned from the rehearsals singing happily and when he opened the door all those present joined in. He once climbed up onto the top bunk in order to conduct the choir—his choir—of mothers and children, using a cooking ladle as a baton.

  At the beginning of July 1943 everyone had agreed that Brundibár would be accompanied on the piano alone. But soon after, they received the exciting news that the SS was going to allow them to use confiscated instruments, and they were permitted to create a small orchestra. This surprising decision was not for any altruistic reason but only because Adolf Eichmann was intending to allow a delegation from the International Red Cross to visit Theresienstadt and wanted to mislead them into believing that “Jews here enjoy every liberty.”

  Ignorant of this, Hans Krása was filled with enthusiasm at the chance of working with an orchestra and he frantically wrote out the parts for the newly available instruments A number of well-known musicians put themselves at the orchestra’s disposal, among them Karel Fröhlich, Fredy Mark, Romuald Süssmann, the Kohn brothers, Fritzek Weiss and Gideon Klein.21

  The premiere of Brundibár took place on 23 September 1943 in the mess hall of the Magdeburg Barracks. Hundreds of prisoners attended the performance. Rudolf Freudenfeld remembered decades later that it was a “festive premiere … Zelenka had the opera performed in front of a wooden fence covered with posters representing the animals in the cast. Kamilla Rosenbaum was the choreographer. The orchestra had to find room in front of the stage which was reached via the aisle. She glanced warmly at all the children; it was a smile pretending that nothing bad could happen from now on, that it was all going to go smoothly, then the lights went out and off we went! I went through the little door to the orchestra, and at this moment I forgot that I was a prisoner; that we were all prisoners. For a while we forgot everything and for a moment we children experienced things we would never forget.”22

  The children’s opera was a huge success. The Bartered Bride had been put on thirty-five times, but between September 1943 and September 1944 Brundibár was performed fifty-five times.23 Every time the room was so full that one could hardly breathe. Soon all “Theresienstädter” knew Brundibár. It was a story pregnant with symbolism, and the infectious enthusiasm of children singing and dancing, and the alluring playing of the orchestra, were balm to the souls of thousands of prisoners. The final chorus became a sort of secret hymn.

  Come let’s beat the drum

  Victory is ours …

  Because we will not let them defeat us,

  Because they will not, cannot frighten us.

  * * *

  ON 9 November 1943, during the “census,” the SS accused the former president of the Council of Elders, Jakob Edelstein, of falsifying the number of prisoners in his daily report. Edelstein and three of his colleagues were taken down to the bunker, where they were imprisoned and later shot. As if that were not enough, two days later, the SS showed yet again just how ruthless they could be and no survivor will ever forget what happened.24

  At about four in the morning of 11 November, all the prisoners were forced from their houses. Alice dressed Stephan in the warmest clothes she could find, and put their rucksacks on her shoulders. The march to the Bauschowitz Valley lasted over an hour. The entire area was surrounded by Czech gendarmes with their machine guns pointed at the prisoners. For more than seventeen hours 40,000 people were forced to stand there in the cold and rain. With every passing hour the children became more fidgety and more distressed, crying and begging for somewhere to lie down.

  Alice had a little folding chair and an umbrella with her. She had Stephan on her right knee and another child on her left. She told the two of them one story after another and for a change, read verses from Stephan’s Wilhelm Busch book out loud until they had learned them by heart. All day she looked for Leopold, but she failed to find him in the sea of people. When night fell, SS officers ordered the prisoners to line up in rows of ten. Alice took Stephan in her arms. She assumed they were about to be shot. She was not frightened. She was very close to her child and there was a black curtain before her eyes, as dark as pitch.

  But the gendarmes did not shoot. Suddenly a loudspeaker announced in Czech: “Back to the ghetto!” Everybody ran through the darkness toward the ghetto in complete panic. No consideration was shown toward the weak. It looked as if children would be trampled to death and their despairing mothers tried to protect them.

  It was after midnight when the valley was finally emptied. Empty that is but for the bodies of the old people who had collapsed and died from exhaustion. Around three hundred people perished that day. Heaven and hell are just round the corner from one another, thought Alice.

  NINE

  The Gates of Hell

  “The noblest specimens of degenerate art…”

  ALICE WAS sitting in the practice room in the Magdeburg Barracks wearing fingerless woolen gloves, a cap on her head and a warm winter coat over her cardigan. She was rehearsing for the premiere of her fourth Theresienstadt concert program. It consisted of Ludwig van Beethoven’s D major Sonata Opus 10, Schumann’s Fantasy in C major, which she had played in her final concert at the Academy of Music, and Smetana’s Czech Dances, which her teacher Václav Štěpán had so brilliantly transcribed for the piano.

  In January 1944, Theresienstadt was covered in drifts of snow and it was icy cold. In their miserable, inadequately heated rooms, the prisoners were subjected to the full force of the weather. It was a blessing that Alice had been prudent and packed some fur-lined lace-up boots before she left Prague, even though it had been mid-summer at the time. So Leopold at least could keep his feet warm in his freezing locksmith’s workshop and Stephan practically ran to his “day home” because the warm shoes felt good in the snow and during break they were allowed to go skating.

  In the ghetto the relationship between Alice and Stephan had become even closer. They went to bed at
the same time, got up at the same time, and except for the time he was at school, they spent the whole day together. Even when Stephan went to concerts on his own in the evening and was temporarily not with her, she always had the feeling he was holding her hand. As long as he could feel secure, feel he was held, his world was safe.

  Alice’s previous concert programs had been received by the audiences with great enthusiasm. In the past few months Alice had had to repeat them many times. Leopold had been encouraging his wife to do the Beethoven Sonata with its famous D minor Largo for ages, because the piece seemed to reflect the situation of the prisoners of Theresienstadt.

  As ever, Alice threw herself into the task. When she prepared for a concert she perfected the pieces she was going to play for weeks in advance. In Theresienstadt she also added two of Chopin’s Études to her daily exercise. Every day she tackled two different ones, because she wanted to bring this difficult repertoire up to concert standard in case she was called upon to play them.

  Today was no different. After the last notes of the sonata had died away she took a little time before she decided on the E major study. Stephan loved this Étude. In Prague Alice had played it while he was going to sleep. Even here in Theresienstadt she would hum the theme to him at bedtime.

  Alice began to play. The piece starts peacefully. Chopin once revealed to his pupil Adolf Gutmann that he had never written a melody to compare with it.1 The Étude affects the listener like a dreamy, melancholic story with a shocking event in the middle. Step by step the emotion mounts, and the tension rises with it until it becomes almost unbearable.

  Suddenly a darker thought distracted Alice from her playing: “My son is in great danger, now, at this very moment,” shot through her head. As she passed the dramatic highpoint of the piece the worry became too much for her and she leaped to her feet and ran to the door, driven by an anxiety she had never felt before. She knocked over the chair and the lid of the piano came crashing down. Alice ran as fast as she could.

  When she got near to the kindergarten she saw Stephan first only in profile: a boy with a white cloth wrapped round his head, a temporary dressing. She knew at once “That is my Stephan!” She was breathless when she reached the people who were giving her son first aid. He had hit a tree on his toboggan. Blood was flowing from a nasty-looking wound on his nose. She thanked the helpers, put Stephan back on the sleigh and set off to the surgeon who had come to every concert she had given so far. He calmed Stephan and consoled his mother, but even though the wound looked worse than it actually was he had nonetheless broken his nose and he needed stitches. Alice was told to leave the room. After a tortuous quarter of an hour’s wait the door to the surgery opened again and Stephan appeared with his cheeks wet with tears and a dramatic-looking bandage round his head. He mustered a brave smile. He bore the scar of the accident for the rest of his life.

  Leopold was amazed when he visited them that evening.

  “How did that happen?” he asked Stephan.

  “We were having a race.”

  “But you must have done something. There is enough room on the hill outside the kindergarten to go to the left or the right of the tree.”

  “True, but the person who comes closest to the tree comes down the hill fastest. I was doing some great tobogganing.”

  “Maybe that was a mistake. Life is not just about doing better than others or forcing them to do things. That is not real happiness.”

  “Should I not have been on the sleigh?”

  “Sleigh racing is fun, isn’t it? But when the competition becomes too intense then the fun is gone, isn’t that so?”

  Stephan thought about it. “I don’t understand.” He went on, provocatively: “A little competition, but no proper competition?”

  Inwardly Leopold was pleased that Stephan was arguing with him. “All right, I’ll explain it to you in a different way. Your mother likes playing the piano above all else.” Stephan nodded. “But she never gives a concert in order to be better than others. She plays simply for the love of music and for the joy it gives others to hear her. She is in competition only with herself when she practices every day. She wants to play as well as she can. But on stage there is no competition.”

  At this Stephan turned to his mother: “Maminka,” he said. “At home there was a big certificate hanging over the piano. You told me that you had won it at a piano competition in Vienna. You have been in a race then. Isn’t that true?” The word “race” sounded so odd that they all three began to laugh out loud. “Yes,” said Alice, “but I did not crash into a tree.”

  * * *

  TWO DAYS later Alice paid her weekly visit to Hannah Eckstein, a Prague acquaintance more or less her age whose two sons she had taught to play the piano. The two women liked one another and Alice had asked Frau Eckstein to come to several of her concerts. The Ecksteins had managed to send their two sons, aged twelve and fourteen, to Sweden just before the deportation. There they lived as “long-term holiday children” with a kind peasant family. Whenever they could, they wrote to their parents in Theresienstadt. As the post was very irregular, it was often months before they had a letter and then they might receive three or four postcards one after another.

  Alice appreciated the calmness that Hannah Eckstein had developed in Theresienstadt, but that morning she was agitated. A few days before she had fallen asleep and woken suddenly with a piercing cry. In her dream she had seen her twelve-year-old boy fighting for life in deep water. Now she had received a letter in which he described how he had been ice skating and gone through the ice and nearly drowned.

  Alice told Frau Eckstein how she had jumped up in the middle of playing the piano because she felt that something terrible was happening. “How does this sort of intuition come about? Perhaps the love between a mother and a child can be so great,” she said looking for an explanation, “that something intangible happens.”

  Rational to a fault, neither Alice nor Leopold had time for supernatural interpretations. However, they frequently spoke of these two events in the subsequent weeks. Alice also reflected on the singular effect the Chopin Études had had on her. She was actually more inclined toward Robert Schumann than Frédéric Chopin, but it was not Schumann’s romanticism that had pulled her from the jaws of despair. At last, she decided to play the twenty-four Études in one concert. First, however, she had to continue practicing her fourth concert program.

  * * *

  THE HALL was as packed as ever, and Leopold and Stephan were as usual sitting in the front row. A few seats further along sat the composer Viktor Ullmann with paper and pencil in his hand. For Theresienstadt’s music lovers, Viktor Ullmann’s critiques of the concerts were a minor sensation. Between 1943 and 1944 he wrote a total of twenty-six of them. Even in the ghetto he demanded an incredibly high standard and judged everything by the toughest criteria, just as if the concerts had taken place under normal circumstances.2

  The premiere of Alice’s fourth program was a colossal success from the audience’s point of view. What, however, would Ullmann write? While Alice played he had been scribbling furiously on his sheet of paper. He typed out his articles in the office of the Free Time Organization. There they were duplicated and then delivered to his readers.

  “She is a friend of Beethoven, Schumann and Chopin’s; for years and here in Theresienstadt we have thanked her for so many delightful hours. Alice Herz-Sommer at the piano means stark, clear, intensive playing with moments, often whole movements, which show off the masters’ genius quite perfectly.”3 Thus Ullmann began his review.

  It is difficult to say whether Ullman was writing at his own initiative or at the behest of the Free Time Organization,4 although without the approval of the Autonomous Jewish Administration it would hardly have been possible to distribute the reviews. Shortly before he was transported to Auschwitz on 16 October 1944, Ullmann gave his collection of reviews, together with his compositions, to his friend Emil Utitz who had taught at the German University in Prague befo
re the war. Utitz had a worldwide reputation and in Theresienstadt he had built up the ghetto library and delighted audiences with lectures on history and psychology.5 He survived Theresienstadt and in 1946 he gave Ullman’s articles to Hans Günther Adler, who wrote the first complete study of Theresienstadt.6 Adler himself spent thirty-two months in the ghetto and also survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

  Another survivor, the writer and musician Thomas Mandl, called the rescued Ullmann pieces “Gold nuggets found in the devil’s test-tube: the so-called ghetto of Theresienstadt7 … They allow us to reach conclusions about a culture the destruction of which was a painful loss, and to imagine what the human spirit is capable of in the face of extermination.”8

  One of these “nuggets” is Ullmann’s review of Alice’s fourth Theresienstadt concert program, which continued:

  … for [Alice Herz-Sommer] reproduction is actually creation; she identifies with the work and its creator. She contributes her eminent technique and great knowledge to the service of the work; she does not belong to the world of piano devils for whom virtuosity is both a goal and a form of self-satisfaction; she has more warmth than flashiness, more innate quality than brio. In the last few years her style has markedly clarified and developed; for this highly-gifted artist was once a virtuoso who specialized in temperament herself. From what everyone says she was made for the romantics, and this is true. She is perfectly accomplished, for example, when she plays the indescribably lovely final movement of the C major Fantasy, Schumann’s Opus 17; this gliding, rapturous piece of high romanticism slides toward the captive listener and he forgets that in the March Scherzo that preceded it the artist had slipped away from the notion of time; you cannot play this movement too quickly, and this wholly musical interpreter deals with its problems and rhythmic monotony in a natural way. The starkness of the “ineffective” Beethoven is close to Alice Herz-Sommer’s heart. In this Sonata Opus 10 No. 3 the Schubertian D minor Largo is always an experience and it was a highpoint for our musician. At the end Frau Herz-Sommer gave us Smetana’s Czech Dances: delicious and innocent and with the famous “Furiant” in which the Czech popular soul meets Franz Liszt.9