A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World's Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor

by Caroline Stoessinger

  INTERLUDE

  Fire

  “I was born an optimist, while my twin was always a pessimist. Very interesting,” Alice says. “Mitzi was my mother’s favorite because she was so small and weak. She was always waiting for catastrophes to happen.”

  When Alice was a child, her father frequently told a story about a fire in his factory that had a profound but different effect on each of the twins. A month or two before Alice and Mitzi were born, Friedrich Herz had eaten his hearty noon meal at home and retired for a nap—a habit of most businessmen at the time—before returning to his desk in the Herz Brothers Factory, which manufactured precision scales. Suddenly he was roused from sleep by shouts of “Fire, fire,” coming through the open windows. The factory building stood less than two hundred yards from the Herz family’s home on the same property. Friedrich slipped into his shoes and ran outside to investigate. Seeing flames leaping from the plant, without a moment’s hesitation he rushed inside to try to control the inferno. He quickly discovered a leaking gas pipe and disconnected it. When he emerged from the building, Friedrich looked as if he had been burned all over. His face, hands, and clothes were blackened almost beyond recognition. When he sat down on the bench to congratulate his workers, he realized that he was in considerable pain. Someone thrust a flask of whiskey into his hands, and others ran for a doctor. For once in his life Friedrich Herz drank liberally in an effort to numb his pain.

  Sometimes when he retold the story, Friedrich made the children laugh as he described how he tried to run toward the factory with his pants falling down. When he had lain down after having eaten, he had only taken off his jacket and slipped his suspenders from his shoulders. In his excitement he had forgotten to pull the suspenders up again. But never once did he insert a note of fear into the story, for Friedrich Herz was instinctively a fearless man.

  Alice says that, while listening to their father’s story, Mitzi, an anxious child, imagined that he could have been burned alive. Alice, by contrast, felt proud that he had solved a problem and emerged a hero.

  Alice believes that her father’s example in such an extreme and life-threatening situation helped to cement her optimism as a child, and influenced the equanimity with which she approached decision making later on.

  FIVE

  Starting Over

  When the Soviet Army liberated Theresienstadt, they simply told the inmates, “You are free, you can go home.” They did not supply food, medical care, or transportation, because they had nothing to give and were ordered to join the liberation forces in Prague. Fortunately the Red Cross quickly intervened to care for those who had survived. Within a few days officials from the Jewish Agency also appeared. Alice learned from them that she could spend part of the summer recuperating on a farm nearer to Prague. Rafi would be able to celebrate his eighth birthday in June in freedom, play in the sunshine, eat fresh and healthy food, and together they could regain their strength. This seemed to her more sensible than rushing into an unknown situation in the city.

  In late July 1945, Alice and Rafi finally made their way back to Prague. But returning Jews were unwanted there and at times faced malicious anti-Semitism; they found that ethnic Czechs refused to vacate the apartments they had seized, now claiming them as their property. Former Czech neighbors who had graciously offered to keep jewelry and valuable furniture safe were unpleasantly surprised when the Jews appeared on their doorsteps to claim them back. Most of the time they responded by angrily shutting their doors. The government offered little help.

  As a non-Jew, Mary, Paul’s wife, had been permitted to continue living in their small apartment while he was briefly interned in Theresienstadt in early 1945. Paul and his wife offered to share their two rooms with Alice and Rafi, but it was only a temporary solution. Alice had to find food and a place to live in her home city, where little more than two years earlier she had had an apartment, work, and savings. But the Nazis had obliterated all trace of Alice Herz-Sommer and had stolen her entire bank account. Another Czech family was inhabiting her former apartment and refused to move. All signs of her furniture, paintings, and antique porcelain had vanished. Although she looked for a few of the people who had promised to save her belongings, they were nowhere to be found. She would have to prove herself a Czech-born citizen by filing endless forms only to discover that she needed to complete still other forms in a truly Kafkaesque turn. In Theresienstadt she had instructed Rafi to speak only Czech so that the Nazis would not understand his words. Now that they were home, Alice had to tell her son once again never to speak German, since speaking it could be life threatening and all prewar German schools had been closed. Perhaps the words “You can’t go home again” had never rung more true.

  Alice began to find piano students, and she would run from house to house to teach, as she had no piano of her own. A few months later, with the help of the Red Cross and what was left of the Jewish community, she was able to secure a small apartment, and the Jewish Community Organization gave her the opportunity to choose a piano from their large storehouse of Nazi-confiscated instruments. Sadly, her own beautiful grand could not be located. After the piano was delivered to her new address, she touched it gently, wondering what had happened to its owner. Now that Alice had a piano, she was able to increase her teaching hours and to practice consistently for the day when she might again play publicly. The opportunity came when she was offered a concert for Czech radio to be broadcast internationally. Not only did she hope to reestablish her career but she also thought the concert would be a way to let her friends know that she had survived the war. Alice played Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata to signal her return.

  As if their betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich had not done enough harm, the Allies continued to mandate postwar strategy. When Truman, Stalin, and Churchill met in 1945 in Yalta, they divided Europe into war zones to be liberated by British, American, or Soviet troops. Those same liberation forces would then control their zones and oversee the establishment of a civil government after the war. This decision was tragic for the countries that would soon fall under Soviet domination. Czechoslovakia was betrayed a second time when Churchill and Truman agreed to allow Stalin’s Red Army to liberate Prague, thus sealing that country’s communist future under Soviet control. General Patton marched into Czechoslovakia, near Marienbad, ahead of the Red Army, but was forced to abort his advance. He and his troops were ordered to halt in Pilsen until the Soviets could liberate Prague nearly a week later.

  In one of the darkest periods in Czech history, the so-called Revolutionary Guards multiplied. Operating outside Czech laws, they sought to rid the nation of the German presence. Many of these Guards had been Nazi collaborators, brutal opportunists who had donned revolutionary hats only to hide their past. They ruthlessly hunted down anyone with German origins or cultural sympathies. Even the music of German composers, including Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, was frowned upon.

  Prewar Czechoslovakia had been a tolerant mix of Czechs, Germans, Jews, and Poles. Gypsies, however, experienced racial discrimination. Yet anyone born within its borders had been automatically granted citizenship. After Soviet troops had liberated Prague in May 1945, President Edvard Beneš returned to Czechoslovakia to issue decrees, which ultimately resulted in the expulsion of over two and a half million Sudeten Germans and more than a half million ethnic Hungarians, and the massacre of thousands of civilians. Mass graves of the victims are still being discovered. Nationalism prevailed over reason after Beneš said the age of minority rights was ended. Beneš and others talked openly about Czechoslovakia becoming a homogenous Czech state free from all minorities, provoking nearly three years of pitiless ethnic cleansing. He seemed to have forgotten the principles of the beloved first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, which guaranteed protection of civil rights for all citizens.

  Incited by President Beneš and raw memories of the brutal Nazi occupation, the Czechs turned against their own citizens in a barbaric frenzy. The worst
of the nation’s reign of terror continued from May 1945 until early 1947. Tens of thousands of ethnic Czech-Germans—who were native-born Czechoslovakian citizens, but ethnically Germanic—were forcibly removed from their homes and marched or taken in cattle cars to the German and Austrian borders, where they had neither food nor shelter. Many died on the way. Wanton rape of thousands of women, hideous torture, and murder were common aspects of daily life. A baker and his wife were shot dead in their shop because they did not give free bread to a Revolutionary Guard who accused them of being German. One journalist reported that he had seen a crowd watching two young men, still alive, hanging upside down from trees. Russians and Czechs carried gasoline containers from a nearby tank, and together they poured the gas over their victims and set them on fire. The journalist watched as onlookers lit their cigarettes from the human torches.

  Alice was appalled by the cruelty the Czechs unleashed in their frenzy of ethnic cleansing. “Before the war, we—Czechs, Germans, Jews—were friends and neighbors. Most of us were bilingual. We had two mother tongues, Czech and German. We read both Czech and German newspapers. Kafka, Rilke, and many other great Czech authors wrote their books in German, while some, like Karel Čapek, wrote in Czech. Before the war we lived all together as Czechoslovaks.”

  President Beneš had rallied the patriots to action with one word, Lidice. In 1942 the Nazis had destroyed the village of Lidice, about one hour’s drive from Prague, in retaliation for the assassination of Deputy Reichsprotektor SS General Reinhard Heydrich, the highest Nazi officer in Prague. On orders from Karl Hermann Frank, all 192 men over the age of sixteen were murdered by Nazi firing squads as they returned from work to their homes on June 10. The women and children were shipped to concentration camps, where most of them died. The residents of Lidice were all Catholic. The village was burned to the ground; the cemetery was dug up and its remains destroyed. Two weeks later, a second village, Ležáky, was similarly destroyed. The Nazis targeted these villages because they were suspected of hiding resistance fighters and their relatives. Although atrocities in the concentration camps and elsewhere were top secret, the Nazis proudly announced the massacre in Lidice as a warning to the Allies.

  Many historians agree that without President Beneš’s authoritative attitude toward the ethnic minorities, violence against citizens who bore German names would not have occurred. Recalling the postwar violence, Alice nods. “Ja, ja, we [Czechs] loved President Beneš, we looked up to Beneš. How could he, the successor to Masaryk, have compromised with Stalin?”

  In the midst of this chaos and death, the NKVD (Soviet secret police), who also freely patrolled Prague after the Nazi surrender, arrested Michal Mareš, a gentile Czech journalist, in early May 1945. Ironically, the fact that Mareš was an idealistic member of the Czech Communist Party did not prevent the Soviets from dumping him into prison on vague, trumped-up charges. Mareš never knew why he had been targeted.

  In solitary confinement, Mareš was told that he had received the death sentence and would be executed. Within a few days a group of soldiers removed him from his cell, marched him into an interior courtyard, bound him to a wall, blindfolded him, and shouted, “Ogoň!” (Fire!). The firing squad had been ordered to shoot into the air, and Mareš was not injured. After exchanging a vulgar joke, described by Mareš in his autobiography, the soldiers returned him to his cell. His fake execution, one of the Soviets’ special forms of torture, was staged twice more. While he was still in prison, Revolutionary Guards murdered Mareš’s helpless old father in his bed, mistaking him for a German. Mareš was released in Prague on the day his father was buried. His father’s assassination opened Mareš’s eyes to the truth of the Soviet system and its ultimate intentions.

  Michal Mareš had been in love with Alice’s playing and had frequented her concerts before the war. They had known each other because Mareš too had been friends with Kafka, Weltsch, and Brod. Mareš just happened to tune in to Alice’s broadcast after her concert had started. Listening to his radio that Saturday night in September 1945, Mareš, now out of jail, wondered who the pianist with this deeply spiritual interpretation of the Appassionata Sonata might be. When the announcer identified the performer as Alice Herz-Sommer, Mareš was overjoyed. Alice was alive. The morning after the broadcast, he lost no time in visiting the Jewish Community Center to try to learn where she was living. Stopping only to buy flowers, he rushed to her apartment.

  For some time Alice had felt that her husband had not survived. She still looked for him day after day for many weeks after she returned to Prague. On the late summer day the Jewish Agency confirmed her instinct and she saw Leopold’s name on the deceased list, Alice was not shocked; she had already accepted his fate. When Mareš appeared, Alice welcomed the attentions of her brilliant admirer. Mareš took on the role of surrogate father to eight-year-old Rafi and happily entertained him for hours while Alice taught or practiced. Mareš helped Rafi with his homework, took him to the cinema and out for as many flavors of ice cream as Rafi could eat.

  Alice was attracted to Mareš’s idealism. Well educated in the humanities and exceptionally knowledgeable about European classical music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mareš was an experienced traveler who had not only toured Europe but also visited several African countries. When he was a teenager he had protested the murder of Francesco Ferrer, the anarchist teacher in Spain, and for this offense Mareš was banned from all schools in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War I, when liberal Czechoslovakia declared independence, Mareš developed strong communist leanings and apparently had made efforts to convince Kafka and Brod of the benefits of socialism for individuals. The hardships and tragedies caused by the German occupation of his country had cemented his belief in the salvation of communist idealism—after all, the Red Army had liberated Prague. Mareš was one of many Czechs who voted Communist to bring the party to a majority in the 1946 election. And then things changed.

  Observing the horrifying incidents of anti-Semitism and the violence against those with German names, Mareš became outraged at the peacetime government’s blindness to the rampage and hatred. He began to report for a weekly journal, Dnešek (Today)—Alice emphasizes “with extraordinary bravery”—on the Czech atrocities against Jewish survivors and ethnic Germans.

  In one article, “The Tragedy of the Czech Kolchoz [Cooperative Farm],” from July 11, 1946, Mareš described the destruction of the villages and damage to farms after the ethnic Germans were forced to leave. “A group of Revolutionary Guards and other gangs from the outskirts of Prague appeared in the Úštěk region and attacked the villagers with guns.… None of the terrified farmers had time to think of any resistance. Within two hours the action was over. Thugs have taken over a paradise that included 120 hectares of very rich land, hops fields, a wheat harvest, and over four thousand trees laden with fruits of all kinds. And today where is all that and in what condition?”

  On trial in 1946 for slandering the police, Mareš spoke in self-defense: “If there is real freedom I cannot be sentenced. If our freedom is only partial or fictitious I don’t care about the sentence.… To keep quiet about what is happening would mean to lose one’s honor. I can be silenced by force but that is the only way to keep me mute.” Acquitted at his first trial, Mareš kept his promise and continued to expose the government’s treatment of Czechs of German descent and all accused of German cultural sympathies. Alice admired his speaking out against injustice and the power of his pen to attract attention.

  Alice and Michal Mareš began to plan a new life together in Prague. Rafi had grown attached to Mareš, and for a time it looked as if he might become part of their little family. His generosity toward Alice was nearly overwhelming. He brought her food and flowers, and one day he arrived with his most valuable possession—a small oil portrait of the head of a Parisian woman painted by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. Though Alice won’t say whether it was an engagement present, it was well known among their friends that she and Mareš
were a couple. Alice was encouraged to build a new life with someone who loved her by her friend Edith Steiner-Kraus, whose husband also had not survived Auschwitz. Edith had remarried, and she and her new husband were making plans to emigrate to Palestine, because Edith believed that she would have more career opportunities in the new country.

  • • •

  Although the Czechs attended early discussions of the Marshall Plan, Stalin nixed their participation in the Western alliance. In early 1948, the purge of non-Communists from the ministry of the interior and the police forces intensified; the remaining twelve non-Communist members of Beneš’s government resigned. In an effort to avoid civil war and greater Soviet involvement, Beneš ultimately accepted the resignations and their replacement with Communist Party members. He too resigned, on June 7, 1948.

  Michal Mareš was increasingly troubled by the threat from the Soviet Union and its allies in the Czechoslovak police forces. He continued to write about the murders of Germans and the ransacking of their property, and about the involvement of Czech officials, policemen, and local dictators. He was the first to use the term Gestapo methods to describe the violence committed by the Czechs on the Germans in the Sudetenland, in Prague, and in various camps where the Germans were interned, awaiting their transfer to Germany. The Communist press viciously attacked Mareš, and he was expelled from the party in 1947. Shortly after the Communist takeover, in February 1948, Mareš was again arrested and this time sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment on fake charges of treason. Still believing in the Czech democracy, Alice thought that he would be released quickly and their life could go on as planned.

  The situation looked very different from the outside. Reading the newspaper reports, Alice’s sisters in Palestine were alarmed. After Israel was proclaimed a state, on May 14, 1948, they increased their pressure on her to emigrate. As Alice continued to hold out hope for life in her homeland, Mitzi and her son, Chaim, traveled to Prague, not for a visit but to convince her twin to leave as quickly as her papers could be obtained. But when Mitzi arrived, she found Alice still optimistic about the future in Prague, and even more so about the romantic pull of a new life with Mareš.