The world's oldest Holocaust survivor has died in London aged 110. Alice Herz-Sommer, a keen musician, was living in Prague in 1943 when she, her husband and son were taken to Theresienstadt concentration camp, where over 35,000 people were killed. After he was transferred to Auschwitz, Alice never saw again Leopold, her husband, and she lost many other family members and friends in the Holocaust.
Musically gifted, Alice has always believed performing at the concentration camp helped her to survive: ''People ask, "How could you make music?" We were so weak. But music was special, like a spell, I would say. I gave more than 150 concerts there,' she said recently. 'There were excellent musicians there, really excellent. Violinists, cellists, singers, conductors and composers.' In the 69 years since the end of World War Two, Alice moved to Tel Aviv in Israel for a short while before moving to London. She continued to play the piano for three hours a day (at least) and, up until 2006, she was swimming every day.
Alice's death comes just a week before a documentary about her life, The Lady In Number Six: Music Saved My Life, is nominated at this year's Oscars. The documentary's producer Frederic Bohbot - who spent a year working with Alice to bring her life to screen - says he's devestated. 'We all came to believe that she would just never die. There was no question in my mind, ‘would she ever see the Oscars.”’
In the documentary, Alice talks about how her desire to save her son - and the love of music - saved her from almost certain death. But she also talks of feeling no residual bitterness to her captors. Instead, she tells the story of one Nazi soldier thanking her for playing music the night she left the concentration camp. 'He said, "Ihope you will come back. What I want to tell you is that I admire you, your playing, hours and hours, the patience and the beauty of the music," she recalled. 'So the Nazi was a human, the only human. The Nazi, he thanked me.'
Her grandson, Ariel Sommer, confirmed her death and paid tribute to his grandmother. 'Much has been written abo**ut her, but to those of us who knew her best, she was our dear "Gigi". She loved us, laughed with us, and cherished music with us.' Who's watching *The Lady In Number Six: Music Saved My Life *before next Sunday?
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.