Alice's Piano

January 15, 2012
The harrowing tale of a Czech concert pianist's survival at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. At 108 years old in 2011, Alice Herz-Sommer is the world's oldest living Holocaust survivor, residing in Jerusalem since the Communist regime forced her from her Prague home in 1949. In this novelistic reconstruction of her life by her friend Piechocki and journalist Muller (Anne Frank: The Biography, 1998, etc.), Herz-Sommer is portrayed as the stronger-willed of twin girls born to a mismatched German-speaking Jewish couple in Prague in 1903. From a young age she was determined to master the piano. Her older sister included her twin sisters in visits with other German-speaking Jewish friends who formed the intellectual literary Prague Circle--e.g., Max Brod, Oskar Baum and Franz Kafka. A student at the German Academy of Music after World War I, Herz became a notable concert pianist and teacher, married businessman Leopold Sommer and had a son, Stephan, by the time the Nazis marched into Prague in 1939. While many of her family emigrated to Palestine, the Sommers remained in Prague, only to see their lives drained bit by bit. First, Herz's elderly mother was deported to Theresienstadt, after which she taught herself the Chopin Etudes out of despair; then the Sommers were deported as well in 1943. At the camp, Alice became a sought-after pianist for the many musical productions organized by the Free Time Organization, while Stephan was enlisted in children's choruses. Herz would often play the Chopin Etudes in concerts for the inmates, while Stephan acted in the SS propaganda film made to show the world what a "ghetto paradise" the camp was. Meanwhile, transports continued, Leopold was deported to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt was rumored to be evacuated. However, Alice was allowed to stay, giving her last concert at the camp in 1945. A miraculous journey of mother and son for whom music provided strength and nourishment.

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Starred review from February 15, 2012
Born to an eminent Jewish family in Prague in 1903, Alice Herz-Sommer is the oldest living Holocaust survivor, still playing piano for hours every day, and this astonishing biography sets her dramatic personal story of family, friendship, and music against a century that includes the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire, genocide, and its aftermath. Many in her family perished in the death camps, but Alice and her little son, Stephan, survived in Theresienstadt, where she put on concerts for rapturous prison audiences and as a show to pretty things up for visitors, including the Red Cross. Music lovers will want this for the detail about her hours and hours of practicing and performance, especially of Chopin's most difficult pieces, which moved and inspired her audiences from Czechoslovakia to the camps, and then, after the war, for 37 years in Israel. Her Jewish identity makes for gripping drama, but it was no big deal in her assimilated Czech family: forbidden to teach non-Jews, her wry comment is, But how will we pay for the maids? When she returns home after the war, the new owners shut the door in her face. In Israel, she feels the contempt for lambs who allowed themselves to be led to the slaughter. Most moving is the story throughout of her loving bond with her son and how she saved him. No politics, intolerance, or self-righteousness, no talk of revenge, always the rigor and joy of music.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)