voice urged her to learn Chopin’s Etudes, the set of twenty-seven solo pieces that express the ultimate sorrow and raptures of human existence and are some of the most technically demanding and emotionally impassioned works in piano repertory. The Etudes provided a consuming distraction at the loss of her adored mother and the hovering web of doom that hung over the city’s remaining Jews. She said, “They are very difficult. I thought if I learned to play them, they would save my life.” And so they did.
In 1943, the inevitable came to pass, and Leopold, Alice, and five-year-old Stephan received their deportation notice. Leopold comforted his wife, telling her from his position in the Jewish council he had heard they staged concerts at what the Czechs called Terezin, the Germans called Theresienstadt. She replied, “How bad can it be if we can make music?” Of that horrific time Alice recalled, “The evening before this we were sitting in our flat. I put off the light because I wanted my child to sleep for the last time in his bed. Now came my Czech friends: they came and they took the remaining pictures, carpets, even furniture. They didn’t say anything: we were dead for them, I believe. And at the last moment the Nazi came—his name was Hermann—with his wife. They brought biscuits and he said, ‘Mrs. Sommer, I hope you come back with your family. I don’t know what to say to you. I enjoyed your playing—such wonderful things, I thank you.’ The Nazi was the most human of all.”
Terezin, northwest of Prague, was an eighteenth century garrison town converted into a Jewish ghetto, used as a front for what was in reality Hitler’s ante-chamber for the death camps. It was touted as a “show camp”—“The Fuhrer’s gift to the Jews”—and was advertised as a place where Jews might find a welcome haven. Indeed, a few deluded souls had applied for admission, paying extra for a room with a view. It was used as a propaganda tool for Nazi officials seeking to demonstrate to the Red Cross that European Jewry was not, as rumor had it, mistreated. It had a library, an art studio, and lecture hall—all of which could be used after performing back-breaking labor.
The Sommers arrived in Terezin and found a city of disease, death, and starvation. Upon arrival, she was separated from Leopold, and she and Stephan were herded with one hundred other mothers and children into a freezing room with filthy mattresses spread on the floor. Alice recalled, “We didn’t eat. In the morning we had a black water named coffee, at lunchtime a white water called soup, in the evening a black water called coffee, so my son didn’t grow a millimeter…” The following year, Leopold was forced onto a train; just before departure, he made Alice promise never to volunteer for anything. The advice saved her life: a little later the authorities asked if the ghetto wives wanted to rejoin their husbands, and they climbed into the cattle cars that took them to their deaths. Alice remembered her promise, and she and Stephan remained behind; at the end of the war, he was one of only 123 children to survive, of the 15,000 who had passed through Terezin. Leopold perished in Dachau, probably from typhus, a few weeks before liberation. A fellow prisoner later brought Alice her husband’s battered camp spoon—his only remaining physical memento.
After Leopold’s departure Alice, despite the horror, found the strength to still rise. She had to remain strong for Stephan. Music also helped her, both spiritually and literally. Throughout her two years in Terezin, through the hunger and cold and death all around her, through the loss of mother and husband, Alice was sustained by a Polish man who had died long before—Frederick Chopin. It was that composer, Alice averred, who let her and Stephan survive. She performed at one hundred concerts, playing from memory. What moved her audiences the most were the Etudes.
Terezin had an orchestra, drawn from the ranks of Czechoslovakia’s foremost figures in the performing arts, whose members literally played for time before audiences of prisoners and their Nazi guards. Mrs. Herz-Sommer, who performed on the camp’s broken, out of tune piano, was one of its most revered members. Even though many of the concerts were charades for the Red Cross, she said the healing power of music was no less real. “These concerts, the people are sitting there—old people, desolated and ill—and they came to the concerts, and this music was for them our food. Through making music, we were kept alive.” One night, after a year’s internment, she was stopped by a Nazi officer who told her, “Don’t be afraid. I only want to thank you for your concerts. They have meant much to me. One more thing. You and your little son will not be on any deportations lists. You will stay in Theresienstadt until the war ends.”
After their Russian liberators arrived, Alice and Stephan returned to their former city. “When I came back home it was very, very painful because nobody else came back. Then I realized what Hitler had done,” she stated. A midnight concert she gave on Czech radio was picked up on short-wave in Jerusalem that alerted her family to the fact she was still alive. In 1949, with postwar anti-Semitism still swirling around Prague and with the Communists tightening their grip, Alice and Stephan joined her family in the new nation of Israel. She became a member of the teaching staff at the Jerusalem Conservatory, learnt Hebrew, and performed to audiences that included Golda Meir and Leonard Bernstein. For almost forty years she enjoyed “the best period in my life…I was happy.” Stephan took the name Raphael, and proved himself an exceptionally talented cellist. It was his appointment to a teaching post at the royal Northern College of Music in England that prompted Alice to move to Britain in 1975. There she obtained a flat in London’s Belsize Park, in apartment number 6. Her resilience was tested again in 2001 when Raphael, on a concert tour of Israel, collapsed with a ruptured aorta and died on the operating table. She found solace in her two grandsons, David and Ariel.
Apartment number 6 was dominated by lovely paintings, her Steinway piano; it also included a battered silver spoon. Alice faithfully practiced, and after her advanced age had immobilized one finger on each hand, she reworked her technique so she could play with eight.
In her later years, Alice received acclaim for being the oldest Holocaust survivor, and due to her remarkable life, she became a beacon to journalists. But though her hands were failing, her musical acumen remained sharp. On her one hundred-and-tenth birthday, the New Yorker’s music critic, Alex Ross, called on her. Because Mrs. Herz-Sommer could find journalists wearying, he presented himself as a musician. When she asked Ross to play something, he gamely made his way through some Schubert before Alice stopped him, “Now, tell me your real profession.”
In 1879, Chopin’s heart was interred in Holy Cross behind a memorial slab that bore a citation from the Book of Matthew—and one that could serve as Alice Hertz-Somner’s epitaph, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
CHAPTER 6: THE BLACK SKY (1910)
“Keynmol fargesn!” “Never forget!” was the rallying cry of the Warsaw Ghetto. The doomed Resistance fighters’ plea was for the world to remember the systematic slaughter of Poland’s Jews. Yet history should also never forget the bravery of those who fought the forces of darkness. One of these was a diminutive woman who cast a giant light.
A proverb—purportedly of Chinese origin—states, “May you live in interesting times.” Although sounding like a blessing, it is meant as a curse—to live in a time of turmoil. This was all too true of Irena, the only child of Dr. Stanislaw Krzyanowski and his wife Janina. The Roman Catholic family lived in Otwock, a town not far from Warsaw, in the midst of a Jewish community. The strong sense of morality that was to define her life was instilled by her father who told her when she was seven years old, “If you see someone drowning you should jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not.” Dr. Krzyanowski was the only physician who treated patients with typhus, a disease to which he succumbed.
Irena studied Polish literature at the University of Warsaw that had segregated seating based on religion. When thugs attacked her Jewish friend, she defaced her card that allowed her to sit in the Aryan section. For the infraction, she was suspended for three years. After reinstatement, she became a member of the Socialist Party, married Mieczyslaw Sendler, and obtained a position as a social worker. Her life was irrevocably altered in 1939 when the Nazis goose-stepped into Poland. Waves of bombers, tanks, and