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

by Caroline Stoessinger

  School is only the beginning. We can learn all our lives.

  I grew up with friendship. I fell in love with my future husband’s mind and his knowledge. In marriage, friendship is more important than romantic love.

  I am never tired because my mind is active.

  Stay informed. Technology is wonderful.

  I learned to move forward with hope.

  Children need unconditional love to grow and develop into full human beings. My advice is to reason with your children, never use harsh words. Patience, kindness, and love—this is the food a child needs.

  Be kind. Kindness is free. It costs you nothing, and the rewards are great for everyone.

  When I play Bach, I am in the sky.

  My world is music. Music is a dream. It takes you to paradise.

  I am richer than the world’s richest people, because I am a musician.

  Children must study music. It helps with everything in life. This beauty is always in my mind.

  When I am with young people, I am the youngest.

  I love people. I am interested in the lives of others.

  No one can rob your mind. I admire the Jewish people because of their extraordinary commitment to high education. Education of the children is a most important family value.

  Understanding of others can lead to peace.

  I can say war only leads to war. Nearly every religion in the world says “Thou shalt not kill,” yet most religions kill in the name of God. Even Hitler’s daggers said “Gott mit uns.”

  Every day is a miracle. No matter how bad my circumstances, I have the freedom to choose my attitude to life, even to find joy. Evil is not new. It is up to us how we deal with both good and bad. No one can take this power away from us.

  Life is beautiful. Sitting together and talking about everything with friends is beautiful.

  We do not need things. Friends are precious.

  We need to treasure time. Every moment that passes is gone forever.

  Music saved my life. Music is God.

  My optimism has helped me through my darkest days. It helps me now.

  The more I read, think, and speak with people, the more I realize just how happy I am.

  When I die I can have a good feeling. I have done my best. I believe I lived my life the right way.

  For Anna

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Above all I am deeply indebted to Alice Herz-Sommer. It is my hope to have captured her life justly and pass along if only a modicum of the courage and inspiration that she has given me.

  An extraordinary debt of gratitude is owed to my friends Marion Wiesel, who suggested writing this book; Elie Wiesel and President Václav Havel, for their generous contributions; and Oldřich Černý, executive director of Forum 2000 and Prague Securities Institute, who discovered and translated previously neglected material on the life of Michal Mareš. And I am grateful to Dr. Willard Gaylin for his lifelong intellectual sustenance and courage.

  Warmest thanks to Alice’s friends, former students, and relatives in London, New York, and Israel who graciously let me interview them, cheerfully taking my calls over the past six years; their information and insights have been invaluable.

  My profound thanks to Lukáš Přibyl, historian and documentary film director, who researched the Terezin archives for relevant information; to the late Joža Karas, who generously shared his research on Alice’s life based on his taped interviews with her in Israel in the 1970s; to Milan Kuna, the Czech musicologist; to the late Karel Berman and Paul Sanford for their hours of sensitive conversations and wealth of accurate memories; to Polly Hancock for her sensitive photography; to Sophia Rosoff for her depth of understanding; to Dr. Arnold Cooper for his support; to the late Dr. Viktor Frankl and Hans Morgenthau for sharing their memories; to Eva Haller for her endless encouragement and enthusiasm; to Carsten Schmidt, the biographer of Felix Weltsch, who found and translated a letter written by Leopold Sommer in the archives of Hebrew University of Jerusalem; to Yuri Dojc for his beautiful photographs; to Laura Siegel for her brilliant help; and to Chaim Adler, Martin Anderson, Dr. Sigrid Bauschinger, Ralph Blumenau, Clemente D’Alessio, Jacqueline Danson, Ruth Boronow Danson, Yuri Dojc, Lucinda Groves, Zdenka Fantlova, Katya Krasova, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Annie Lazar, Hilde Limondjian, Nurit Linder, Anthony LoPresti, David Lowenherz, Ester Maron, Keith Menton, Edna Mor, Lea Nieman, Valerie Reuben, Lawrence Schiller, Meira Shaham, Dr. Alan Skolnikoff, Connie Steensma, Geneviève Teulières-Sommer, Robin Tomlinson, Ela Weissberger, and Ambassador Michael Žantovský for their invaluable contributions.

  This book would not be complete without a very special note of infinite gratitude to my agent and friend Marly Rusoff for her faith and support; to Cindy Spiegel, my publisher and editor, for her belief in the project and her brilliant edits; and to Lorna Owen, for her understanding and constant encouragement. And to my beloved daughter, Anna Elizabeth Stoessinger, to whom I dedicate this book.

  NOTES

  PRELUDE

  1 “Where they burn books”: Heinrich Heine, Almansor: A Tragedy (1823), trans. Graham Ward (True Religion, 2003), p. 142.

  2 Raphaël, or “Rafi”: Alice named her son Bedřich Štěpán Sommer and called him Štěpán. When she and her eleven-year-old son immigrated to Israel, they changed his name to Raphaël. Throughout the book I refer to him as “Raphaël” or “Rafi,” as Alice does today. Even in recounting stories of him as a baby, she always refers to him as Rafi and never as Štěpán.

  3 “This is our answer to violence”: Leonard Bernstein, Findings (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), p. 218.

  4 “He is a wise man”: Epictetus, quoted in Lloyd Albert Johnson, A Toolbox for Humanity: More Than 9000 Years of Thought (Trafford Publishing, 2006), p. 158.

  1. ALICE AND FRANZ KAFKA

  1 “Someone must have slandered Josef”: Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchel (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), p. 3.

  2 “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning”: Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, trans. Stanley Corngold (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), p. 3.

  3 “It was late evening when K. arrived”: Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), p. 1.

  4 “I am familiar with indecision”: Ronald Hayman, Kafka: A Biography (Oxford University Press, 1982).

  5 “It had never been my intention”: Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, trans. G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), p. 249. This statement was the last paragraph in Kafka’s brief résumé:

  RÉSUMÉ

  I was born in Prague on July 3, 1882, attended the Altstadter elementary school to the fourth class, then entered the Altstadter German State Gymnasium. At the age of eighteen I began my studies at the German Karl Ferdinand University [Charles University] in Prague. After passing the final state examination, I entered the office of Attorney-at-Law Richard Lowy, Altstadter Ring, on April 1, 1906, in the capacity of probationer. In June I took the oral examination in history and in the same month was graduated with the degree of Doctor of Laws.

  As had previously been agreed with the attorney, I had entered his office only in order to acquire a year’s experience. It had never been my intention to remain in the legal profession. On October 1, 1906, I entered his service and remained there until October 1, 1907.

  Dr. Franz Kafka

  1 “I could not understand”: Ibid., p. 26.

  2 “That was what he was like”: Ibid., p.107.

  3 “To have one person”: Ibid, p. 196. The entire quote is, “There is no one here who wholly understands me. To have one person with this understanding, a woman for example, that would be to have a foothold on every side, it would mean to have God.”

  4 “Such gentle hands”: Ibid., p. 196.

  5 “That was the beginning”: Ibid., p. 196.

  2. A TOLERANT HEART

  1 “Peace with honor”: Neville Chamberlain, speech at Heston Aerodrome and 10 Downing Street, September 30, 1938, in James Cush
man Davis, The Human Story: Our History, from the Stone Age to Today (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 326.

  2 “the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia”: Dr. Detler Muhlberger, A Brief History of the Ghetto of Terezin (Oxford, 1988). http://www.johngoto.org.uk/terezin/history.html. Ronald H. Isaas and Kerry M. Olitzky, Critical Documents of Jewish History: A Sourcebook (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, Inc.), 38–48.

  3. PEELING POTATOES

  1 “It’s no accident many accuse me”: Interview with Oriana Fallaci published in Ms., April 1973, p. 76.

  2 “Although I don’t know much about music”: Menahem Meir, My Mother Golda Meir (New York: Arbor House Publishing Company, 1983), p. 46.

  3 “It is the duty of everyone”: Howard Taubman, The Maestro: The Life of Arturo Toscanini (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951), p. 224.

  4 “doing this for humanity”: Ibid., p. 227.

  5 “The fact that Toscanini and other”: Menahem Meir, My Mother Golda Meir (New York: Arbor House Publishing Company, 1988), p. 46.

  6 “Nearly religious devotion”: Ibid., p. 45.

  5. STARTING OVER

  1 “You can’t go home again”: You Can’t Go Home Again is the title of a novel by Thomas Clayton Wolfe (1900–1938), an American from North Carolina. The book was published posthumously in 1940 by Harper and Brothers. Ending that book, Wolfe wrote, “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … fame … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

  Wolfe’s books were bestsellers in Germany, where he was lionized by literary society and was especially friendly with Mildred Harnack, who with her German husband, Arvid, organized a resistance group with their anti-Nazi friends and former university students. The Nazis gave the group a code name, Die Rote Kapelle (The Red Orchestra). In 1936 Wolfe made his last trip to Berlin, to attend the Olympics. During that visit he witnessed brutal incidents against Jews. Inspired by Mrs. Harnack, he wrote a short novella, “I Have a Thing to Tell You,” about his experiences, which was published in The New Republic. After the story appeared in three installments on March 10, 17, and 24, 1937, the Nazis banned Wolfe’s books and prohibited him from traveling there. Arvid Harnack was arrested and executed in December 1942. On orders from Hitler, Mildred, an American from Wisconsin, was beheaded in Plotzensee Prison in early 1943.

  2 “A group of Revolutionary Guards and other gangs”: Michal Mareš, Dnešek 1, Prague, July 11, 1946.

  3 “If there is real freedom”: Michael Mareš, Prǐcházím z periferie republiky (I Come from the Periphery of the Republic), trans. Oldřich Černý (Prague, Academia Press, 2009).

  4 He confirmed his plan: According to Pavel Koukal, the editor of Mareš’s autobiography, Prǐcházím z periferie republiky, Mareš “would in the future like to live alongside Alice Herz Sommer, whose son Štěpán [Rafi] he wanted to adopt.” On page 177, Koukal references a letter to Mareš from Ivan Bambas-Bor from August 21, 1947. Bambas-Bor invites Mareš to Kutná Hora, a town forty kilometers from Prague, to deliver a lecture. Expecting Mareš to travel with Alice, he also invites Alice to play a concert following the lecture.

  6. THE TIN SPOON

  1 “Music is love, and love is music”: Melissa Muller and Reinhard Piechocki, A Garden of Eden in Hell, trans. Giles MacDonogh (London: Macmillan, 2006), p. 67.

  2 “Her death was not terrible for her”: Ibid., p. 80.

  3 “We are all well except Štěpán”: Leopold Sommer, trans. Carsten Schmidt, Letter to Willy and Felix Weltsch, Israel, Jerusalem Hebrew University (JNUL), Arc. Ms. 418 Felix Weltsch, February 26, 1940.

  4 “Love does not consist in gazing”: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, trans. Lewis Galantiere (New York: Harcourt, 1939), p. 73.

  7. NEVER TOO OLD

  1 “is not actually a university in the normal”: Ralph Blumenau, London, Amazon.com profile of Ralph Blumenau.

  2 “without music life would be”: Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1895), trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, Maxims and Arrows, Para 33.

  8. MUSIC WAS OUR FOOD

  1 “You are no doubt speaking”: Tim Smith, Baltimore Sun, October 2, 2010.

  2 sitting alone among many elderly: Ivan Klíma, The Spirit of Prague, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Granta Books, 1993), p. 22.

  3 “Chopin’s Divine Mirror”: Music in Terezin 1941–1945 (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1990), pp. 172–73.

  4 She smiles recalling Pavel Haas’s: While Pavel Haas was writing songs based on Chinese poetry in a concentration camp, his actor brother, Hugo, was playing a leading role in a Hollywood film with Gregory Peck. Haas perished in Auschwitz. Hugo, who had escaped to California before the war with his non-Jewish wife, lived out his days playing small character roles in numerous films.

  10. SNAPSHOTS

  1 “Nothing misled the German intellectuals”: Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 362.

  2 “Then came the Reichstag fire”: Ibid., pp. 364–65.

  3 “Memory is the scribe”: Aristotle, quoted in John Bates, A Cyclopedia of Illustrations of Moral and Religious Truths (London: Elliot Stock, 1865), p. 583.

  11. MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH

  1 “was not, in any sense”: Golda Meir, My Life (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975), p. 179.

  2 “If only the defendant”: Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), p. 348.

  3 “I was just responsible”: The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem, Volume 5, Israel State Archives, 1995, p. 1982.

  4 “Yes, but he was Jewish”: Peter Z. Malkin and Harry Stein, Eichmann in My Hands (New York: Warner Books, 2000), p. 110.

  5 “a transmitter”: Adolf Eichmann Trial Transcript, Great World Trials, edited by Edward W. Knappman (Canton, Mich.: Visible Ink, 1997), pp. 132–337.

  6 “I could not take my eyes”: Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, p. 347.

  7 “I never did anything”: Adolf Eichmann Trial Transcript, Great World Trials, edited by Edward W. Knappman (Canton, Mich.: Visible Ink, 1997), pp. 132–337.

  8 “Now that I look back”: Roger Cohen, “Why? New Eichmann Notes Try to Explain,” The New York Times, August 13, 1999. Cohen writes, “[Eichmann] complained regularly about death-camp quotas not being fulfilled, about the problems of getting all French Jews to the death camps, and about the intermittent failure of the Italians to cooperate. As late as 1944, he played a leading, and open, role in the killing of Hungarian Jews, and in August of that year he reported that four million Jews had died in the death camps and another two million at the hands of the Nazis’ mobile extermination units in Eastern Europe. At no point did he show the least compunction over the planning, organization and execution of what became known as the Holocaust.”

  9 “Legally not, but”: Adolf Eichmann Trial Transcript, Great World Trials, edited by Edward W. Knappman (Canton, Mich.: Visible Ink, 1997), pp. 132–337.

  10 “I will leap into my grave”: Ibid., pp. 132–337.

  11 “banality of evil”: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 252.

  12 “The sad truth”: Ibid., p. 276. “[Arendt] concluded that Eichmann’s inability to speak coherently in court was connected with his incapacity to think, or to think from another person’s point of view. His shallowness was by no means identical with stupidity. He personified neither hatred or madness nor an insatiable thirst for blood, but something far worse, the faceless nature of Nazi evil itself, within a closed system run by pathological gangsters, aimed at dismantling the human personality of its victims. The Nazis had succeeded in turning the legal order on its head, making the wrong and the malevolent the foundation of a new ‘righte
ousness’ In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm. Conventional goodness became a mere temptation which most Germans were fast learning to resist. Within this upside-down world Eichmann (perhaps like Pol Pot four decades later) seemed not to have been aware of having done evil. In matters of elementary morality, Arendt warned, what had been thought of as decent instincts were no longer to be taken for granted.” From the Introduction by Amos Elon, p. xiii.

  13 “there is a strange interdependence”: Ibid., p. 288.

  14 “Wouldst thou know thyself”: Edgar Alfred Bowing, Friedrich Schiller (London: John W. Parker & Son), 1851.

  15 “I only said what everyone”: Max Bruch, Letter to Estera Henschel, Musikantiquariat Dr. Ulrich Drüner, Stuttgart, Catalogue 65, 2009, p. 23.

  12. NO HARSH WORDS

  1 “We began a simple life”: Paul Tortelier and David Blum, Paul Tortelier: A Self-Portrait (London: William Heinemann, 1984), p. 112.

  2 “The art of Johann Sebastian Bach”: Ibid., p. 24.

  13. FIRST FLIGHT

  1 “The State of Israel is established”: Golda Meir, My Life (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975), p. 228.

  2 “The State of Israel!… and I”: Ibid., p. 226.

  3 “The State of Israel will be open”: Ibid., p. 227.

  4 “At Basel, I founded”: Ibid., p. 226.

  5 “In five years”: Ibid., p. 226.

  6 “It is absolutely essential”: Daniel Barenboim, http://www.west-eastern-divan.org/the-orchestra/daniel-barenboim.