It seemed more of a revelation than a warning and she returned to the work bench actually strengthened. From then on, hour by hour, day after day she and Edith talked of the past and dreamed of the future; they planned concerts for when they were free and delighted in the thought of the music they would play. Later, Alice realized that in those twelve weeks of splitting mica, she exchanged more words with her friend than she ever had with Leopold during the twelve years of happy marriage.2
* * *
AFTER THE autumn transports it took a long time for things to get back to normal in the camp.3 The utilities had collapsed. There wasn’t the labor anymore. The kitchens no longer functioned and there were no nurses in the sickbays. Anyone who collapsed just lay helpless on the ground. There were thousands of positions vacant in health and administration and women had to perform the men’s roles, even those which were physically demanding. On 13 December 1944 the authorities announced a new Autonomous Jewish Administration4 and with this there came, too, a new incarnation of the Free Time Organization, although its only remaining members were the women consigned to the mica-processing works. Nevertheless, by the end of December 1944 there were concerts in Theresienstadt once more.5
The artists received the news as a gift from heaven. Anyone performing that evening could leave the late shift as early as 5 P.M. Despite the joyful anticipation of her performance, Alice always left the hut with an uneasy, tormented feeling. Seeing the envious eyes of a hundred or so exhausted, hard-working women did not make her happy.
* * *
ON CHRISTMAS Eve 1944, Alice was working the late shift and, as usual, she and her fellow workers left at around ten. The way back to the camp through the darkness led them over a hill past the barracks of the Czech gendarmes, who guarded the huts. However, that night the men were nowhere to be seen. They had already retired to their guardroom to put up a small Christmas tree and cover it with festive decorations. The lights shining through the window struck the women like symbols of hope. “The little tree not only lit up our way, but it gave us warmth. Something of the love felt by those who set it up rubbed off on us, and we carry that with us still,” Gerty Spiess wrote in her autobiography. Gerty, a German Jew, sat at a neighboring table to Alice in the mica-splitting workshop.6
Alice was still bathing in that light when she returned to her billet, but she was glad that Stephan was already asleep and she did not have to try to explain that Christmas tree. The boy would have simply asked too many questions. “What is Christmas? Why do Christians celebrate it and why is it that we Jews do not?” After the terrible weeks they had endured, she no longer had the strength to answer him.
Nonetheless, Alice enjoyed the holiday on the first day of Christmas. At last she could spend a whole day with Stephan. Pavel Fuchs paid a call, as he did virtually every day. The two friends played together in a carefree way and Alice listened to them laughing heartily as if they were living in freedom.
* * *
THE NEW year seemed full of promise. People said that the German Reich was on the brink of collapse: “retreat on all fronts, it can’t last much longer.” The camp concerts now became symbols of the coming liberation.7
In the middle of January 1945, however, Alice and her musical colleagues faced a new setback. The SS ordered a final, collective punishment for the inmates of the camp. The activities of the Free Time Organization were banned forthwith. Forbidden cigarettes had been smuggled into the camp,8 but by the beginning of February the ban was lifted. Soon there were more concerts than ever and the inmates fought over the tickets.
On 7 February 1945 Alice played the Chopin Études again. The auditorium of the town hall was completely packed and a five-page handwritten review survives, although the author is still unknown. “Yesterday evening, 7 February 1945, the artistic world of Theresienstadt was highlighted by the great Chopin evening given by Frau Sommer-Herz … I have heard Rubinstein’s pupil, Raoul von Koczalski, play, and Rubinstein was a pupil of Chopin himself…” In this, though it scarcely matters in the context, the anonymous author is incorrect: Koczalski’s teacher was not Rubinstein, but Carl Mikuli—one of Chopin’s most important pupils What is much more significant is the fact that the reviewer was more moved by Alice’s playing than by a pianist who was so close to the Chopin tradition. The reviewer continued in a euphoric vein, describing the extraordinary effect Alice had had on the audience:
If France referred to its great tragedian Sarah Bernhardt as the “divine Sarah” why should we not call our great Chopin interpreter Frau Sommer-Herz the divine mirror of Chopin … Her superb playing ranged from melancholy, passion, the endearing amiability of the French temperament; just the qualities that the composer, sick with consumption, incorporated in his own idiosyncratic way. Whenever the artist, with her magical variations of tempo, released real storms of mood the natures of two nations came to the fore—the Slavic and the French—emerging like a sculpture in sound. It was clear that the Genius of the Muses had found a patron, and the listeners knelt before her concert, as if in prayer.9
The Harp Study: Op. 25 No 1 in A flat major
“Magical! A spellbinding study, quite unique in its beauty.” Even now, when she is over 100 years old, Alice Herz-Sommer speaks of the Harp Study, Op. 25 No. 1 with girlish infatuation. “It seizes the listener from the very first note.” As Robert Schumann wrote in 1837 after Frédéric Chopin played it to him himself: “After the study I saw one lovely picture after another as if in a dream, that one has when only half-awake, and wants to dream all over again…”10 It is full of security, warmth and hope.
And, at last, the prisoners who listened rapt to Alice’s playing cherished the very real hope that they might soon be liberated. On 3 February the SS had announced that two days later 1,200 people would be released and allowed to travel to Switzerland.11 Hardly anyone believed it. Even the criteria for choosing who should go made people ill at ease: only those in good health could travel, and no relations of prisoners who had been deported to Poland. Also excluded were important prisoners or intellectuals.12
But the events on the day itself silenced the skeptics. On 5 February an express train with well-upholstered compartments chugged into the station and every one of the 1,200 passengers had a seat to themselves. Their original transport numbers had to be removed from their suitcases. Rahm took it upon himself to make sure that only respectable items of luggage were included and that all the passengers were issued with sufficient food for the journey. The SS helped the elderly to get onto the train and carried their luggage onto the wagons. During the journey the passengers had to remove their Stars of David. A few days later the first letters arrived from Switzerland.
The rescue operation had been planned many months before. In August 1944 a group of eminent Swiss figures had made contact with Heinrich Himmler through his personal physician, Felix Kersten, asking for 20,000 Jews to be released into Switzerland.13 Initially Himmler refused, but on 8 December Kersten managed to wring a partial agreement out of Himmler, who—by then—was only interested in trying to save his own skin.
The Tender: Op. 25 No. 2 in F minor
After the promise of hope and happiness in the First Étude of the second cycle, the charming F minor study sounds tender, “deliciously dreamy and gentle, a little like a child singing in its sleep.”14
Alice had often played this second study to Stephan as he went to sleep and the seven-year-old knew it very well. Now, he enthusiastically followed his mother’s playing, with rare concentration and devotion. The wonderfully delicate melody moves constantly between piano and pianissimo like a gentle breeze, but though it is an enchanting piece, it is written in a minor key which casts an aura of melancholy over it.15
Its note of mourning echoed Alice’s mood, even though the prospect of liberation seemed more real. She had no idea where Leopold was, nor if he was still alive. Was he permitted evenings like these which lifted the morale of the prisoners? Since the National Socialists had snatched Leopold from
her, Alice’s concerts had always been at some level a bidding prayer for her husband’s life, a plea to see him again.
The Bold: Op. 25 No. 3 in F major
The third study in F is as melodic as it is aesthetic, and an example of Chopin’s compositional fantasy. There is much in the first motif that is capricious, graceful and jocular, but in the second the mood changes and a sad, plaintive motif is introduced. The graceful melody could be said to mirror the life of Zdenka Fantlová, who had left Theresienstadt for Auschwitz in one of the October transports. Zdenka arrived there on 18 October 1944 after several tortuous days in a cattle truck. Finally the door was slid back and she was able to see the guards holding truncheons and their dogs on the ramp. She breathed in air filled with a “sweet smelling smoke as if they were burning flesh somewhere.” She told herself, “Death reigns here, and the dangers are great. It threatens you … if you are lucky, they will not kill you, you will have to summon up all your strengths in order to survive…”16 Zdenka had always loved music and now she could conjure up memories of the concert halls of Theresienstadt and the music she had heard there, music which had given her so much strength.
Now, however, she was standing on the ramp with 1,500 other deportees and being measured up by three SS officers. Zdenka Fantlová understood very quickly that what happened next was “now about life or death.”
Someone had polished their boots until they sparkled and the deaths-heads on their caps made it only too clear why they were there. All three looked into the crowd with very uncompromising expressions. The one in the middle, who was wearing gloves, was giving orders with his right hand. You could see he was sorting: “Left! Right! Left! Left! Left! Right!…” Now it was the turn of us three. My mother was terribly worried and struck with foreboding. I looked the officer right in the eye. He was a good-looking man who seemed neither particularly stern nor entirely evil, only his bright blue eyes had a steely glaze to them. Without reflection he said “left” for my mother and with the same swift certainty, “right” for me. When it came to my sixteen-year-old sister he made no immediate comment, so I grabbed her by the arm as quick as a flash and took her with me to the right. I still had a moment to look at my mother’s face. I saw her total horror and despair and thoughts of never seeing us again. Then she was quickly lost in the crowd.17
After the selection came the strip search. It was absolutely forbidden to keep any personal effects.
We had to strip in a small room and stand naked next to one another. I still had Arno’s ring on my finger. I did not want to be separated from it. Quite the reverse: it was my talisman, my strength and hope; it was the flame that would keep me alive. We had to goose-step through a narrow aperture behind which an SS man was waiting to check that we really had nothing more. I was already nearly at the spot when we were thrown into panic by the sound of crying, pleas and punches. What had happened? A girl had hidden her engagement ring under her tongue, but the man in uniform had found it. He beat her mercilessly and led her away.
A fellow sufferer saw the ring on my finger. “For God’s sake, throw the ring away! You’re mad, they’ll beat you to death. It is not worth it for a bit of tin: you saw what happened to the girl in front of us…”
Despite what had happened I decided to run the risk. I put the ring in my mouth and rendered myself up to my fate with the SS inspector.
I was aware of all the consequences but I stood by my decision and I was ready to pay any price. He began by looking through my hair and I was waiting for the order to open my lips, but at this moment a superior officer intervened in the inspections and told him to hurry up. So I was pushed on and it was the turn of the next girl. “Quick, off!” I had kept the ring. It was the first test fate had given me, and I had passed.18
The Dancer: Op. 25 No. 4 in A minor
The Fourth Étude in A minor is an infectiously rhythmic study of syncopation with an impetuous dancing melody. One of the greatest pianists of the nineteenth century, the Hungarian Stephan Heller, compared it to the first bar of the Kyrie from Mozart’s Requiem.
Thirteen-year-old Anna Flachová was leaning against the wall of the auditorium in the town hall and absorbing the music, entranced by it. She was one of the few remaining members of the Brundibár ensemble.
Flaška, as she was called, had begun to study piano in 1937 when she was seven. Two years later she had her first singing lesson. The arrival of German troops in Czechoslovakia ruptured her childhood mercilessly. When she was ten, she was seen walking down the street, obligatory yellow star on her coat, by two German soldiers. “What a pretty girl. Pity she’s a Jew.”19 But that was harmless compared to other anti-Semitic attacks she had to endure. When her mother bought Flaška new white shoes, a woman stopped in the street and pointed at them, screaming: “You Jewish swine, give me those shoes. One of your sort should not have shoes like that!”20
On 26 November 1941, her eleventh birthday, she and her family were ordered to “fall in with the transport.” It was the first time she had ever seen her mother cry. They arrived in Theresienstadt on 2 December 1941.
The Études worked their way under Flaška’s skin; so much so that she began to see a clear aim for the future: “If I succeed in getting out of the ghetto then I shall become a pianist.” Flaška survived, going on to study piano and singing in Prague. She later became a successful performer and a professor at the conservatoire in Brno.21
The Sarcastic: Op. 25 No. 5 in E minor
The introduction to the E minor study is slightly mocking, a quality shared by Karel Švenk, the most popular actor in the ghetto. Before the war he had been a professional cook and only acted as an amateur member of the “Club of Untried Talents.” According to a later account “his comical portrayal of a ridiculous fat man, together with his dithering, made him rip-roaringly funny as Podkolesin in Gogol’s Marriage.”22
He had arrived at Theresienstadt with the first construction detail at the end of 1941 and began his cabaret act soon after. Despite much competition it remained the best and the most popular in the camp. Though Švenk was an amazing all-round talent—author and director, lyricist and composer—he remained modest and was always convivial: “Švenk was a great clown above all. He did not come from an intellectual milieu, he stood where you put him, clumsy, comic but good; he could disarm and unmask the wicked opponent by a simple look—that was his typecast. He had the great sad, smiling eyes of the classic rogue who was forever the victim of the unscrupulous or the cunning. Whether they succeeded or not, he always survived.”23
However the Council of Elders found his play The Last so provocative that for the first time they felt it necessary to censor part of it. They approved the performance on condition that the last scene be cut. Švenk pretended to comply, but when the play was performed it was shown in its entirety. It was about deportation and dictatorship and in it Švenk mocked the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies, referring to “Jews and cyclists, who are guilty of everything.” At the end the female dictator is annihilated, the curtain falls and the audience is told to go home. The rule of the fools has come to an end. But as an actor spoke the epilogue, another interrupted him to say that “below and outside” the rule of the fools continued. They still could not say what they really thought. The curtain rose again and the first chords of the Terezin Hymn, which Švenk had written for one of his first cabarets in 1942, were heard. The entire cast stood hand in hand on the stage and silently mouthed the words. The audience understood only too well and rewarded the performers with unstinting applause. Without being able to write a single note of music, Karel Švenk had the only real anthem of the ghetto. The last words were: “… we will laugh on the ruins of the ghetto, hand in hand.”24
But Švenk did not live long enough to hear this laugh. By the time Alice played the Fifth Étude in February 1945, he had already been sent to Auschwitz on one of the autumn transports. When the camp was liberated, he was still alive but only just and he died from exhaustion as he made his way home.
The Thirds: Op. 25 No. 6 in G sharp minor
Some commentators have said that the Sixth Étude in G sharp minor with its chromatic thirds sounds like a dance of death. It is certainly one of the most difficult pieces ever written. According to the critic Thomas Pehlken: “With its suppressed dynamics (sotto voce) and its darting tempo, the piece is reminiscent of those beloved works of the romantics: the Sabbath dance scene by Berlioz and Mendelssohn’s Scherzo, Op. 20.”25
The mysterious mood of the piece seemed to encapsulate the rumors that had been haunting Theresienstadt for days. At the beginning of February 1945 the SS issued two orders to the Autonomous Jewish Administration. The first was to construct a series of gas-tight rooms, the second was to fence in a large area near the perimeter walls to secure them against attempts at escape. By this stage, rumors of the gassings in Auschwitz had reached the ghetto and the prisoners were suspicious, fearing that the orders were the harbingers of death.
The camp commandant Karl Rahm sought to appease the inmates: “How could you think such a thing—we’ll have no gas chambers in Theresienstadt!”26 He told the Jewish elder Benjamin Murmelstein that they wanted to build a bomb-proof food store and a chicken farm that would be safe from thieves.
However, an analysis of the plans for the so-called ventilation system seemed to prove what the builders feared: they were to construct pipes that would bring gas into the rooms. One of the technicians, Erich Kohn, told Murmelstein of the plans, declaring that no Jews would consent to work on the building of an installation that would be used for the gassing of Jews or anyone else for that matter. They would rather be shot before the eyes of the whole world than continue the work. The discussion lasted all night and next morning Murmelstein told Rahm what had been said.
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