Alice played pieces from the classical, romantic and modern schools. After about half an hour Schnabel stopped her and said, with great goodwill: “I cannot add anything to what you have already learned, either from a technical point of view or a musical one.”
He then named the price for this praise and Alice had difficulty keeping her feelings under control. She would have to teach for an entire month to pay his fee, but she controlled herself from making any comment and simply pressed the money into his hand, said the briefest of farewells and left his flat as fast as her legs could carry her.
Years later, by which time she could finally laugh about it, her friend Edith Kraus, a former master class student of Schnabel’s, told her that shortly after his meeting with Alice he had emigrated to England and had possibly even bought his ticket before she played for him.
* * *
ALICE FIRST met Edith Kraus on a damp and murky afternoon in March 1937. It had alternately rained and snowed all night, so the streets were covered in gray slush. Fortunately Alice had no need to venture out, but when there was a ring at the door and she opened it, she saw an enormous dog, whose naturally white coat was dripping wet.
“Yes, well who are you then?”
“This is Pucki,” said the well-dressed young woman who was holding the dog’s lead.
“Putzi?” Alice asked in disbelief.
“No, Pucki.”
“Oh thank God,” Alice laughed, “Putzi is what I call my husband.”
The visitor laughed, too, then introduced herself to Alice.
“I am Edith Kraus. Can we come in?”
Alice had heard of Edith Kraus, a pianist who had been born in Vienna and grew up in Carlsbad. As a five-year-old she had been able to play by ear all the pieces that her seven-year-old sister was practicing; at eleven she had played Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C minor with the Carlsbad Orchestra. The conductor Leo Blech was so impressed by her talent that he wrote to Franz Schreker, the then director of the Berlin School of Music: “I think I would be doing you and your school a favor by sending you this great talent.” Edith started studying the piano at the Berlin School of Music at the age of thirteen. A year later she became the youngest member of Schnabel’s master class.
“I have come to ask you a favor,” Edith said. In the meantime Pucki had sniffed out every corner and taken a sudden interest in the chaise longue. As Edith watched appalled, the dog leaped up on to the seat which Alice had just had covered in a beautiful pale fabric. Alice could hardly have been more relaxed about the muddy paw marks: “He has a good nose,” she beamed. “He knows the best place to sit.”
Edith quickly recovered her composure and explained the reason for her visit. “I am preparing the Martinů dances,” she said. She had had no dealings with Czech contemporary composers before and was at a loss to interpret them. “I wondered if you could play them for me. You have mastered them so well.”
Alice played them for her and by the evening, when Edith left, they were firm friends. Edith’s visits became a regular occurrence and soon the two young women were inseparable, playing duets together for the sheer pleasure of it. There was never any thought of rivalry between the two friends. Their love of music was too great, and it was forever opening new horizons for them. Their meeting was to mark the beginning of the greatest friendship of Alice’s life.
* * *
NOT LONG after Alice met Edith, she and Leopold managed to get tickets for one of a series of concerts given by the Kolisch Quartet, from Vienna. The evening was later jokingly dubbed “the night of the dancing handbag.” Alice was six months pregnant and before the concert began she put her leather evening bag on her stomach. As soon as the music began the baby started to kick in rhythm to the music and the handbag to jump, so that it “danced” on her stomach.
“Leopold, look!” Alice whispered, and her husband, equally astonished, stared at the “dancing bag.” Was the child going to be as musical as the mother?
Even before their wedding the Sommers had agreed that they wanted to have three children. They were not in a hurry, however, but Alice was now thirty-four, which at the time was considered rather old to have your first child. Given that she was also small and delicate, Leopold was worried that there might be complications and asked the advice of his brother-in-law, Felix Mautner, who was a doctor. Mautner suggested that the child should be born in a clinic, rather than at home, which was then the usual practice. Felix was at pains to secure a bed in the private clinic of a prestigious gynecologist (he himself specialized in orthopedics) but he wanted to be present at the birth.
At 10 A.M. on 21 June 1937 he took Alice into the delivery room. In order to pass the time between labor pains, he told her light-hearted anecdotes from his professional life. An amusing and extrovert man, Mautner was a master of the punchline. He called Alice and Leopold the family’s “little idiots,” while Leopold’s brother and his wife were dubbed “the big idiots.” The difference in size between the two brothers was a mere two centimeters. Felix happily told his stories all day long and succeeded in making not only Alice laugh, but also the nurses and the midwife too. The mood in the delivery room was so relaxed that the doctor kept popping in for a laugh. The birth itself was, as expected, complicated and in the end Felix Mautner had to help with the forceps. But finally, at about seven in the evening, Alice Sommer delivered a baby boy. When she saw the tiny creature for the first time she forgot her pains. There were still pieces of caul clinging to the infant’s body; didn’t people call that “lucky skin”? Didn’t old wives say that children born with this could expect particularly good fortune in life? And wasn’t it also a good omen that he was born on Midsummer’s Day?
When the door to her room opened and a colorful bouquet advanced toward her, Alice was already half asleep. Suddenly Leopold’s beaming face emerged from behind the flowers and the nurse brought in the baby, swaddled in blankets, and placed him in Leopold’s arms. As exhausted as his mother, the baby went to sleep peaceably, but not before Alice and Leopold had named him Stephan, after her piano teacher, Václav Štěpán.
SIX
Occupation
“They came like vultures…”
“HE LIED,” Alice thought, as she knocked the snow from her shoulders and opened the door. “What is this man going to get up to next?”
She had scarcely entered the hall when Stephan ran into her arms. Alice knelt down on the floor, closed her eyes and pressed her child to her bosom for a particularly long time. She was tired. For two nights she had hardly slept.
“Door, Maminko,” said Stephan, who unwrapped himself from his mother’s embrace and gave the door to the flat a kick. He chuckled as it slammed.
“It is shut,” said Alice with relief. What she had just suffered should remain outside. Worries about Hitler and the future should not be allowed to trouble her family’s happiness.
Two hours previously she had hurried into the center of Prague through the snow, having told the nanny she needed to do some shopping. This was not in fact true. What she wanted to do was to see with her own eyes what was happening to her home town. It was 16 March 1939. Exactly twenty-four hours had passed since the German army had occupied the city: “This is the second ethnic German transmitter” began the radio broadcast announcing the invasion.
“The microphone is in the museum gallery on Wenceslaus Square. The lower half of the square has just filled up with people who are singing songs of joy. German troops have entered the square … Everywhere hands are being raised in Hitler salutes. The historic moment has come: 10:40 A.M. on 15 March Adolf Hitler’s soldiers have arrived at Wenceslaus Square, the heart of the city.”
This was propaganda. Prague was occupied by artillery, supply troops on motorbikes, army lorries and armored cars and the Czechoslovak Republic had ceased to exist. The president, Emil Hácha, had announced that he had placed the destiny of his country into the Führer’s hands. The mist that hung over the city refused to disperse all day.
Alice now saw that the marching soldiers were only the advance guard. A few moments later motorbikes drove along the Graben escorting a cavalcade of cars. In one open-topped vehicle stood Adolf Hitler, his right arm lifted in a “German salute,” staring blankly at the crowd. “Where is he looking?” Alice asked herself. Only six months before, after the occupation of the Sudetenland, he had given repeated assurances that he made no claims to the rest of Czechoslovakia.
“He was lying all along. What will he do next?” But the white-haired old man next to him made Alice even angrier: it was President Hácha—“that fascist”—who was raising his arm in humble submission to “the Führer.” What treachery it had been, what humiliation!
Bewildered, Alice started walking home. Suddenly, she felt like an outsider. Where did she actually belong? She was from Prague and had grown up in a German world. From her childhood she had looked up to Germany. It was the land of Goethe and Schiller, Bach and Beethoven. Now the Germans had overrun her country. She was not a German … or not anymore. But was she a Czech, because she took the Czech side? Or, even though she had never taken any particular interest in her origins or in Jewish traditions, was she first and foremost a Jew—a member of a race that provoked as much hatred from the Czechs as from the Germans?
“Come, Maminko,” shouted Stephan, distracting his mother from her thoughts and toward the piano. He hit two keys, gently but properly, one after the other and then both at the same time. “Listen, Maminko!”
Even when Stephan was only a few weeks old, Alice had noticed that the baby reacted unusually powerfully to music. Her hopes had come true. Now, at nearly two, he listened to the music Alice played with remarkable concentration, rare in one so young. However, more and more frequently he went to the piano himself and searched for notes and harmonies. Alice used to put Stephan on her lap and together they went on a voyage of discovery through the major and minor keys. Later Alice packed the child and his nanny off to get some fresh air while she lost herself in her playing.
That night, when Leopold came home, he and Alice sat down in front of the wireless set and listened as Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, read out the “Führer and Reichs Chancellor’s Decree for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia”: “The ethnic German population of the Protectorate will become German subjects and Reich’s citizens according to the Reich Citizenship Law of 15 September 1935. From now on they will be qualified by German blood and German honor […] The remaining inhabitants of Bohemia and Moravia will become subjects of the Bohemian and Moravian Protectorate.”
There was no mention of the sovereignty originally promised to the Czechs and it was crystal clear to Alice and Leopold that the occupying power would discriminate against them as they did the Jews in Germany and the former Austria. Would it be weeks or days before the first anti-Jewish decrees were issued?
Alice was in touch with many of the Jewish artists and intellectuals who had found temporary exile in Prague. They had fled immediately after the Nazis’ seizure of power in Germany and the Anschluss in March 1938, and many of them were preparing to flee again—to France, to England, even Palestine, the USA or South America.
Alice and Leopold had considered emigrating in 1938 when Hitler had brought the Sudetenland “home into the Reich,” but in the end had decided against it. They tried to be optimistic, telling themselves that “it would not be so bad,” but even Alice, who spent so many hours a day lost in her music, could not hide from the political reality, which from now onward could only mean bad news for the Jews under Hitler’s influence. The brother of her friend Helene, Franz Carl Weiskopf, had returned from Berlin where he had been the editor-in-chief of the anti-fascist Volksillustrierte and had plenty of stories to tell of the National Socialist terror, and Alice’s brother-in-law Felix Weltsch had written “several articles against the new barbarism in Germany” in Selbstwehr.1
There were compelling circumstances which Alice believed required her to stay in Prague. On the one hand there was Stephan. Could she expect a child so young to make a journey into the unknown? On the other hand, there was her mother. Sofie’s medical condition meant that she felt unable to emigrate to a country far away and Alice would not countenance leaving her behind. There was also a third consideration: lack of funds. A visa for Palestine would cost Alice and Leopold the astronomical sum of around £1,000 a family. Her sisters Marianne and Irma had both decided to emigrate, but had difficulties raising the money, so the whole family chipped in. Sofie Herz gave both children their inheritances, albeit against her will and only after great arguments. Even Alice had given her sisters part of her savings.
On 14 March 1939, two days before Hitler’s triumphant entry into Prague, the Adlers—Marianne and her husband and their son Heinz, who was almost eleven—and the Weltsches—Irma and Felix and their daughter Ruth, who was now twenty—had set off with all their heavy suitcases for Palestine. Alice and Leopold accompanied them to the railway station to see them off.
* * *
“ON TUESDAY at around 9 P.M. we arrived at the Wilson Station, the former Emperor Franz-Joseph Station … On platform two we found our train and many of our friends,” Max Brod wrote later.2 Immediately after the Munich Accords in October 1938, Brod, like Felix Weltsch and a few other like-minded friends and acquaintances had “decided on emigration to Palestine, which was then under a British mandate.” For Zionists like Weltsch and Brod it had been, as they put it, a “life’s intention” to one day emigrate to the Promised Land.
Yet they still saw no desperate reason to hurry. Hitler had said that with the takeover of the Sudeten German areas he had attained his goal. The French and British governments agreed to the secession; for Paris and London, the carving up of Czechoslovakia was the “price of freedom.” It was a high price, since Czechoslovakia had lost not only most of its industry in the secession, but also its border defenses. The Czechs themselves called it “treachery” and “horse-trading.” Before they realized what the consequences of the secession would be, the government ordered total mobilization: a measure that was as fruitless as it was futile.
Edvard Beneš, who had succeeded Masaryk as President of the Republic in 1935, resigned and went into exile in 1938, and Emil Hácha succeeded him in November. According to Max Brod it was not yet “life and limb threatening but to all extents and purposes” a shift to the right.3 In the short term it was not going to get better for the Jews—after five years of National Socialism in Germany he was as certain of this as Felix Weltsch—and it might get worse. The intellectual climate in the so-called Second Czech Republic became increasingly reactionary, and strengthened the resolve of both journalists to leave their homeland. President Hácha had quite clearly modeled his domestic policies on Germany and proved that he could adopt even the Jewish policies of the German Reich. Intellectuals like Weltsch and Brod were particularly at risk.
Hácha issued a decree early in 1939 which proved the final straw for Felix Weltsch. His younger brother-in-law Emil Adler, Marianne’s husband, still needed persuading. Marianne and Heinz had returned to Prague from Gräfenberg on 26 August 1938 before the signing of the Munich Agreement. T
hey had returned for their personal safety. Emil was a man without illusions and realized that similar measures would be introduced against the Jews after the cession of the Czech border regions that had been imposed after the Anschluss. But after ten years as principal physician at the Priessnitz Sanatorium he neither would nor could leave at once. Rumors of expulsion and killing of Czechs, so-called “Sudeten” Jews and Gypsies in the border regions, forced his hand and at the end of October 1938 he returned to Prague for good.
He arrived in Prague planning to open a private clinic and had rented a floor in an imposing house on the Moldau, which would serve not only for a clinic but was also large enough to accommodate the family. Although he was preoccupied with his plans he saw the many hurdles the authorities had put in his way. As a student he had come into contact with Social Democratic circles and at the German university he was elected president of the social democratic students’ organization. This was now clearly held against him.
Then Emil learned that all Germans or German-speaking Czechs who had left the Sudetenland after 1 January 1939 were forbidden to practice their professions in Prague. Now he saw all too clearly that he had no future there. The measure was obviously targeting Jews, for the majority of the Sudeten Germans had rejoiced at the arrival of the Wehrmacht and saw no reason to leave.
Emil sought the advice of his brother-in-law. Felix Weltsch knew Palestine: one of his brothers had already been living there for ten years, working as an architect in Haifa, and Felix had been to visit him. Felix encouraged his brother-in-law to emigrate, telling him that Palestine needed good doctors and that they would be received with open arms.
Felix himself had waited for weeks before he received the necessary paperwork for himself and his family. The emigration forms were, according to Max Brod, exactly like Kafka’s Castle: “every sort of obstacle was put in your way. Long forms had to be filled out five or ten times. They contained innumerable questions and sub-questions: the number of silver knives and forks you owned and wanted to take with you, was for example of particular interest to those in authority. Just the numbers? No, they wanted to know the precise weight. Finally I had to submit permission to God-knows-how-many different offices to receive their various stamps, and testify that I had paid up all the taxes on my dog, and I had never owned a dog.”4 The emigrants were keenly aware that their mother country did not think it a duty to help them to leave the danger zone, but instead, with complacent laziness and pettifogging bureaucracy, spun more new webs in which to entangle them.
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