One of Alice’s most endearing memories of Kafka was the cloudless summer day he showed up unannounced at their country house on the nanny’s day off. The twins were fidgety and impatient; they wanted to explore the nearby forest or go somewhere for a picnic. Kafka suggested a walking expedition in the surrounding countryside. Sofie reluctantly gave her permission, and with Alice and Mitzi as companions, Kafka took off for an adventurous day of exercise and fun. He was a speed walker, having taken up the sport to build strength in his frail body. The little girls did their best to keep up, but after the first mile, they had to slow down and then stop for a break. Kafka found a log the twins could use for a bench and a tree stump for himself. From his perch he commanded their attention with stories about fantastic imaginary beasts. The more they laughed the wilder Kafka’s inventions became. After an hour or so he produced “magic” sandwiches and a thermos of tea, which he claimed an invisible animal, half-bear and half-goat, had left for them in the woods. The great writer-to-be had as much fun as his charges.
Alice would always remember Franz Kafka as an “eternal child.”
From the age of nine Alice would sit beside her mother and listen to Kafka talk endlessly about the book he was writing or the one he wanted to write. Her mother was fascinated with the writer’s gifts, as literature and music had become an escape from her unhappy arranged marriage. Sofie was particularly intrigued by Kafka’s opening sentences, which were modern, even revolutionary in the early years of the twentieth century. He began his novel The Trial with “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” The Metamorphosis begins with “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” And The Castle draws the reader in with “It was late evening when K. arrived.”
Alice would beg him to tell her the stories over and over again. But she always wanted to know the ending—and that he could not answer. He simply could not complete his work. Later on he would write, “I am familiar with indecision, there’s nothing I know so well, but whenever something summons me, I fall flat, worn out by half-hearted inclinations and hesitations over a thousand earlier trivialities.”
When Alice and her mother asked him why he went to law school and became an attorney if he did not want to practice law, Kafka’s answer was simply that he could not decide what to study. He made this doubly clear when, after quitting Richard Lowy’s law firm, he wrote, “It had never been my intention to remain in the legal profession. On October 1, 1906, I entered his service and remained there until October 1, 1907.”
One year Kafka celebrated Passover with the Herz family. Despite his distaste for observing such traditions, he found Passover with Alice’s relatives a joyful family affair. He seemed to tolerate and even accept in the Herz home precisely what he despised in his own family, especially his father’s hypocritical annual practice of Jewish traditions. In A Letter to His Father, Kafka wrote, “I could not understand how, with the insignificant scrap of Judaism you yourself possessed, you could reproach me.… Four days a year you went to the synagogue, where you were … closer to the indifferent than to those who took it seriously.”
At holiday time Sofie’s Orthodox mother, Fanny, who lived with them, took over the kitchen and did her best to observe the Passover traditions. With the help of the maid, Fanny made kosher chicken soup, matzo balls, and the most tender brisket of beef. A few days before the holiday, she disposed of all leftover breads and pastries made with yeast and cleaned the cooking utensils, plates, and glasses with boiling water. Sofie and the children helped with the housecleaning. They polished the silver and set out their finest table linens. Alice was the most industrious, working hard to gain both her mother’s and her grandmother’s approval.
Alice’s father, who was usually excessively frugal, opened his home to friends—gentiles, neighbors, strangers, and the poor—for the holiday, in keeping with the tradition. He also invited the most senior of his factory workers to share in the seder feast. In 1912, the year that Kafka probably participated, the Herz seder was one of their largest and, aside from the family and Felix, included Kafka, neighbors, several factory workers, and the writer Oskar Baum. Irma cautioned Alice to treat Baum, who was blind, just like anyone else. Much later, when Max Brod wrote about Kafka’s first meeting with Baum, Alice recognized her sister’s advice as a seminal moment in her moral education. As Brod was introducing them, Kafka silently bowed to Baum, greeting the blind man as an equal. “That was what he was like,” Baum said. “Superior in depth of humanity to the ordinary run of kindness.”
Alice does not recall all who came for the holiday that year. What she remembers is folding the snow-white linen napkins, so she knows there were many guests at the table that evening. Alice also thinks that Kafka asked her to sit next to him.
It was the duty of Alice and Mitzi to distribute the Haggadoth, the booklets recounting the story of Passover. Friedrich Herz, who had also been raised Orthodox, led the abridged readings in German; Alice and Mitzi, who were the youngest, read the four questions together; their father explained the ancient meaning of Passover; and Kafka helped the girls search for the afikomen. They all repeated the ancient text “This year we are here, next year in Jerusalem.” No one, with the possible exception of Kafka, could have imagined that Jerusalem would become their safe haven in less than thirty years. When their father led “Dayenu,” the children’s favorite Passover song, in his rich baritone voice, everyone, even Kafka, sang. When the men retired to the living room for fine French brandy and cigars, they asked eight-year-old Alice to play. She obliged with a bagatelle by Beethoven and a Chopin waltz.
Kafka frequently fell in love. Although he made it clear that he dreamed of marriage, he complained that no one understood him. “To have one person with this understanding, a woman for example,… would mean to have God,” he wrote in his diary. He was not looking for a wife who insisted on crystal chandeliers and—as Alice says—“that heavy German furniture.” But Alice and her mother were certain that he would never decide to marry. He introduced Felice Bauer to them as his fiancée, then broke off the engagement only to get engaged to her a second time—for just a few weeks, until he changed his mind again. Hoping to comfort him, Alice’s mother suggested to Kafka that he, like Beethoven and Brahms, was an artist and that he belonged to the world rather than to one woman.
But that was before Dora. Both Alice and her mother felt that twenty-five-year-old Dora Diamant was a different and affirmative presence in his life. Alice’s mother said Franz had found his own true nature in Dora, and she hoped he would marry her. Thinking back to those days, Alice feels that her mother was instinctively right. Kafka was attracted to Dora’s independent spirit as well as her motherly gentleness. Watching her scaling and gutting fish in the kitchen of a summer camp, he disapprovingly blurted out, “Such gentle hands and such bloody work.” Dora was embarrassed. Brod revealed, “That was the beginning of his friendship with Dora Diamant, his life’s companion.”
Like Kafka’s mother, Dora had been raised Orthodox, but like Kafka, she had escaped from her family’s plans for her life. Even though Kafka had suffered through his Bar Mitzvah in 1896, he had since declared himself an atheist and a socialist. Dora’s family had insisted that she marry early and aspired for her to be a wife and mother. Dora literally ran away from home to Berlin to get an education, and became a kindergarten teacher. She had leaned toward Zionism and shared Kafka’s interest in Yiddish literature, later influencing his fascination with the Talmud. When she and Kafka began living together in Berlin, it was, they said, their first step toward a permanent home together in Palestine.
It was clear that Dora loved Kafka completely. When they first met and fell instantly in love, Kafka was forty years old, fifteen years older than Dora and already suffering with tuberculosis. As his disease soon required hospitalization, he was admitted to a sanatorium in Kierling, near Vienna. A
lice remembers her mother’s concern when Dora moved into Kafka’s room to help care for him day and night. Miraculously, she never contracted tuberculosis. For a time he seemed to improve and even wrote cheerful letters to Alice’s family. Even so, their time together was short-lived. Barely a year after their love affair started, on June 3, 1924, Kafka died, just as he was about to become famous.
Kafka’s body was brought back to Prague for burial in Strašnice, the New Jewish Cemetery. Together with her entire family Alice attended his funeral in the cemetery chapel. Alice was nearly twenty-one by that time and well on her way to her own celebrity as a pianist.
Alice would see Dora once again—in 1950 in Israel, where Alice had immigrated after the war. Dora had settled in England, having escaped Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Holocaust; she had married and had a daughter. Because she had been an impassioned Zionist, Dora’s single visit to Israel was a dream come true. Again Alice, Dora, and Felix Weltsch shared stories about Kafka, and pondered whether he would have been pleased or frightened by his posthumous fame. If he had lived, would he have agreed finally to marry Dora? Often calling herself Dora Kafka, Dora still believed that she would have been his wife, whereas Alice was certain he might have found some clever way out of the decision.
Alice has never stopped thinking about Kafka and his kindness to her. But why was he so indecisive? Why did he leave his books without endings? After many years of mulling it over, talking with Brod, and reading numerous books on Kafka, Alice has a theory—not found in any of the biographies of him she owns.
Alice explains that Kafka’s mother was Orthodox, whereas his very strict and—according to Franz—somewhat cruel father was completely secular, maybe even an atheist. If Kafka practiced his mother’s faith, he would face his father’s wrath. And to renounce the religion of his mother and her ancestors would be to profoundly hurt the one who gave him life. Alice concludes, “Kafka never knew where he belonged, was never certain of his identity, or which path to take. To choose would mean that he would disappoint one of his parents. This, I think, was the core of his problem.”
Alice notes that Kafka himself might be amused that scholars today debate his work in a Kafkaesque way. Some say his writings have nothing to do with Judaism or with his Jewish roots. Other scholars declare his work to be completely Jewish writing.
Alice accepts both verdicts as partially true.
INTERLUDE
An Emerald Ring
“He was not very beautiful—not good-looking at all,” Alice muses. “But he was oh, so charming. Women were crazy for him.” She is referring to Kafka’s confidant and biographer Max Brod. Having known each other in Prague—Brod wrote rave reviews of Alice’s first concerts and was a good friend of Alice’s family—Alice and Brod reconnected as immigrants in Israel after Alice arrived in 1949.
Always a ladies’ man, Brod was currently smitten with Annie, a red-haired young Russian woman. He had decided that this beauty should improve her piano skills under Alice’s expert guidance. Because he was a friend and one of the few connections to her past life in Prague, Alice agreed to squeeze the unlikely student into her schedule.
During her second lesson the phone rang. It was Brod. “Is she still there with you?” he wanted to know. “Is she wearing a green ring? I gave her an emerald and I want to make certain that it is still on her finger!” Alice ran back to the piano, looked at the woman’s hand, and saw that she had turned the ring so that it looked like a wedding band, with the small stone hidden in her palm. Later Brod admitted that he was trying to rehabilitate the lost soul and feared that she might have sold the ring for drugs on the way to her lesson.
This incident reminded Alice of the stories her brother Paul had told her of Brod’s excursions with Kafka to Prague’s exclusive brothels. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
Alice smiled to herself and continued the lesson.
TWO
A Tolerant Heart
“I love people. All kinds of people. I love to talk with people.” Alice tucks in her lips with an endearing grin. Then, closing her eyes for a moment as if searching for the right words, she clarifies her thoughts. “I don’t look at people as a group to be judged. Behind every man and woman is a story. I am interested in learning about the best in each individual.”
Alice tells stories of the Gypsy children who roamed Prague’s streets when she was a child. Important friends of Alice’s family often crossed to the other side of the road when they saw the five-and six-year-old Roma boys and girls approaching to beg for a few coins or chocolates. Alice was sternly warned to stay away from such people. “They are dirty and they steal.”
“But they are smiling at us. Maybe they are hungry?” Alice would reach out to them, and every time her mother or her father would pull her back, she felt wounded.
Later she would think of those same children when she would accompany a performance of Dvořák’s Gypsy Songs, based on the exciting Roma folk music he loved. What if she were Roma? What was it like to be ostracized? Alice could never have believed then that she would find out firsthand. Nor could she have foreseen that her rights as a Czech citizen would be stripped away without recourse. Czechoslovakia was, after all, a free, democratic country with equal rights for all. Even capital punishment was nearly unknown.
Hitler hated the Jews even more than he despised the Gypsies. Everyone around Alice listened to the unsettling political news from Germany since Hitler had come to power. At first many Jews and gentiles alike did not take the inflammatory speeches, absurd racial laws, and hints of war too seriously. Many believed that the civilized, class-conscious Germans, with their enormous regard for university education, would never allow this impostor—a high school dropout who had lived in flophouses, not to mention never attended university—to lead a country that respected the aristocratic, highly educated Otto von Bismarck, who had unified the thirty-nine German states, as their ideal statesman. Convinced that the Germans would not put up with Hitler and his gang at the helm, many people assumed or tried to hope that the Nazi madness would quickly pass. And most decent people were unable to presume that Hitler was lying when he signed pacts and made promises to those whom he intended to destroy. Too many leaders in a position to make a difference in Britain, Europe, and America—including Churchill and Roosevelt—failed to recognize Hitler’s evil genius until it was too late. When Vienna welcomed the German annexation of Austria, in 1938, with cheering, swastika-waving crowds, the optimists could no longer avoid the wake-up call. Jews all over Europe, desperate to escape, were urgently applying for visas to safe havens.
In 1938 Alice, at thirty-four years of age, had never been happier. She had everything she had ever wanted: she had given birth to her son the year before, she had a loving marriage, devoted students, and a promising career. Like many assimilated Jews, she and her husband still felt relatively safe under the Czechoslovak Army’s protection. The Czech side of the border with Germany was heavily fortified, mountainous terrain. So when her friend Max Brod—who had been a committed Zionist for some years—began encouraging Alice and her sisters and their families to immigrate to Palestine with him, though her sisters decided to follow Brod, Alice felt compelled to stay in Prague. She and her husband did not want to risk resettling in a foreign land with such a young child; and although Alice’s father had died of a heart attack nearly a decade earlier, her aging mother, whose ill health made it impossible for her to move abroad, needed Alice. Her eldest brother, Georg, who had led a decadent lifestyle of gambling and drinking, had died back in 1931 from the effects of alcoholism. And her other brother, Paul, subject to different racial laws because he was married to a Hungarian Catholic, had never settled on a profession. Both he and his wife loved gambling and were unreliable. Furthermore, Alice still believed in the promises of the treaty the British and French had made to protect her homeland.
Alice’s mother sold most of her property to help with her sisters’ expenses, and Alice also contrib
uted a substantial part of her savings to help defray the cost of emigration. The British demanded a landing fee—equivalent to $100,000 in today’s currency—for each person entering Palestine.
On September 29, 1938, determined to avoid a military encounter with Hitler, Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and France’s Prime Minister Édouard Daladier betrayed their treaty with Czechoslovakia in a joint meeting with the Führer in Munich. They agreed to Hitler’s annexation of a large part of the Czech territory, known as the Sudetenland and home to 3 million citizens, in exchange for his promise that he would make no further territorial demands in Europe. Most historians agree that the combined Czech, French, and British forces could have soundly defeated the ill-equipped Germans, whose tanks broke down on the road to Prague, thus preventing further war in Europe. But as the two heads of state sacrificed Czech democracy to the Nazi dictator, Chamberlain bragged that he had achieved “peace with honor, peace for our time.” His moments of shameful glory were fleeting. The next day, October 1, Hitler’s troops invaded the Sudetenland.
On a snowy March night in 1939, Max Brod and Alice’s sisters, along with their families, boarded the very last train to leave Prague before the German occupation. Bound for Naples, where they would take a boat to Palestine, the train trudged across Czechoslovakia toward the Sudetenland. In the middle of the night it stopped on the Czech side of the German border, which was already occupied by Nazi troops. SS guards, guns drawn, inspected the train, car by car before the train continued.
A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World's Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor Page 2