On June 10, 1940, the Gestapo took control of Terezín, a small town one hour’s drive from Prague, immediately turning the immense brick-walled eighteenth-century garrison town into a ghetto and the adjacent smaller fort into their prison for political enemies. By the end of that year they had forced all the Czech residents of the town to evacuate their homes and had dispatched a shipment of young and strong Jewish men to transform the buildings into a concentration camp.
Identified by its German name, Theresienstadt, it was conceived by Hitler as a “model” camp and officially established on November 24, 1941. Cunningly organized by Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann to deflect and hide the truth of the Nazis’ mass murders of Europe’s Jews, it was advertised as a spa town, where Jews could be resettled to comfortably live out the war. As part of the ruse, it was the only camp where Jews could apply for admission and special privileges, and pay their own travel expenses; they could even—for a very high price—request a view of either a peaceful lake or a beautiful mountain from their new home. These were just added ploys for the Nazis to confiscate people’s money, jewels, and property before killing them.
Still living in Prague, Alice and Leopold began to hear the rumors of death, diseases, lack of sanitation, and contaminated water there. And after the first transports of human cargo from Theresienstadt to the East, the truth behind the rumors began to emerge: in place of pleasant apartments, Czechoslovak Jewish citizens—including musicians, writers, scientists, and teachers—were being herded together into airless rooms without privacy, sanitary facilities, or food. Theresienstadt was both a ghetto and a concentration camp.
Most of the prisoners were crowded into either large military barracks or the small houses that the former citizens of the town had built to shelter single families. Some of the new arrivals were crammed into larger buildings that had once been offices or schools. One of the biggest problems in the beginning was the lack of toilets. People waited in long lines, and toilet paper was forbidden for Jews. Not even sick children or the elderly were allowed to go to the front of the line.
So many of the Jews whom the Prague Jewish Council—under the strict supervision of Nazi officers—had sent to Theresienstadt were musicians, artists, and writers that, as soon as they arrived in Theresienstadt, they began organizing musical activities secretly, in spite of the fact that any type of music making had initially been strictly prohibited. Many of the musicians had cleverly smuggled their instruments into the camp. In order to hide his cello one artist completely dismantled it, buried the parts in his clothes, and then glued the pieces together again in a men’s barrack. Although the artists were careful to stage their improvised concerts clandestinely in basements or attics, they would be discovered. To their surprise, however, the artists were not met with punishment but ordered to perform more frequently.
The Nazis understood that adding musical and artistic events to their spa setting could be a huge publicity stunt to prove to the outside world that all was well with the Jews. Thus they ordered the prisoners to form a Freizeitgestaltung, or Free Time Committee, to organize concerts, lectures, and other events. Hans Krása was named head of the musical section. Crudely printed posters appeared in barracks to advertise the programs. Because of the overwhelming response, tickets—free, because prisoners had no money—were distributed to control admittance. Even music critics were encouraged to write reviews. So many musicians were among the prisoners sent to Theresienstadt that for a short time four symphony orchestras could play simultaneously. Theresienstadt was the only place in occupied Europe where jazz was performed—the Nazis called it “degenerate music” and had banned it not only because it was American but also because it was played by blacks and Jews.
The artists took their performances just as seriously as if they were on the world stage. Not only were they trying to inspire their prisoner audiences but the musicians were playing for one another. Alice says, “As our situation became more difficult, we tried even harder to reach for perfection, for the meaning in the music. Music was our way of remembering our inner selves, our values.”
After the war Edith Steiner-Kraus was offended when questioned about the quality of the performances in Theresienstadt. “You are no doubt speaking about precise rhythm, intonation, balance, diction.… The superficial nature of your question troubles me terribly—as if any of that mattered. Don’t you understand? We had returned to the source of the music.… I don’t understand why people, when they talk about Theresienstadt, mention those elements that you ask about. You’ll never understand, or get close, to what music truly meant to each of us as a sustaining power and as a way of using our skills to inspire, beyond criticism, beyond any superficial evaluation. We were music.”
While performing, the prisoners could nearly forget their hunger and their surroundings. Besides the terror of finding their names on a deportation list to the East, the fear of dying of starvation, typhus, and other diseases had become a reality. Medicine was forbidden for Jews. Hundreds of bodies were carted off daily. Between those who were sent on to Auschwitz and other death camps in the East, and those who would perish from illness, of the more than 156,000 who passed through those gates, only 11 percent would survive until liberation, on May 8, 1945.
The novelist Ivan Klíma wrote after the war of his first night in Theresienstadt “as a boy of thirteen,” sitting alone among many elderly, sick people and watching a performance of Smetana’s opera The Bartered Bride. “There were no costumes, no orchestra, no set; it was cold, but we sat transfixed by the music. Many cried. I felt like crying too. Years later when I saw a beautifully produced performance it was not nearly so moving as I had remembered.”
What the Nazis failed to understand was that the power of music to provide comfort and hope to the performers and their audiences was stronger than the terror of their masters. Every composition that was written in Theresienstadt, and every concert played there, became a moral victory against the enemy. The beauty of their civilization became for many prisoners a shield against despair. Through music, the performers could hold on to their personal identities, while the audiences, transported out of time and place through the music, could for the duration of the performances feel that life was almost normal.
Before the deportations, since the Nazis had banned performances by Jews, concerts in Prague were moved to undisclosed venues. By late 1939 the Prague Jewish Orphanage had become one such location. The theater could seat nearly 150 people, but it was dangerous for so many to be noticed coming or leaving, even in darkness. Most of the audience would sleep on the floor to avoid arrest. The atmosphere at the concerts was in complete contrast to the daily reality of restrictions, humiliations, ever-changing ordinances, and arrests. Alice gave several full-length recitals at the orphanage. “My audiences wanted to hear Beethoven, Schubert, Czech composers, and the music of Mendelssohn that the Nazis banned. We did not listen to them, we chose not to hear. Can you imagine,” she asks, “that Hitler tried to destroy all memories of Mendelssohn, who only one century before had been recognized as a German hero—and all because he was born Jewish?” Mendelssohn, who was raised as a Lutheran convert, wrote works based on Christian texts. “What could they have been thinking when the brownshirts burned his music, obliterated the statue of him, and destroyed portraits of him right in front of the Leipzig Gewandhaus while Sir Thomas Beecham was conducting a concert that night of November 10, 1936? People still said, it can’t get worse. Hitler’s regime is an aberration. The question we should have been asking was, if this is what the Nazis did to the dead, what would happen to living Jews?”
At the request of Rudi Freudenfeld, the son of the orphanage’s director, Alice presented a few programs for the young audience. Rudi, a teacher, had volunteered to help with the many children sent to Prague from Poland and other countries farther east by parents who had mistakenly hoped that they would be safe there. Now that Jewish children were forbidden all education—public and private—they had little to o
ccupy their time.
In 1938, Hans Krása composed a short opera based on a fairy tale invented by his friend Adolf Hoffmeister, which had never been performed. They had titled their one-act opera Brundibár (“little bee” in Czech), after the name of the main character. Since for inexplicable reasons the Nazis had not restricted artistic activities for children, Krása and Hoffmeister offered to help occupy the youngsters’ time with a production of their opera. Building the sets, making costumes, learning their roles, participating in rehearsals and performances could provide distraction for the children, who were not allowed to play outside. Preparations soon began, with the goal of a performance to be staged in the orphanage. Their one full rehearsal took place for a small audience in early 1942. And then the Nazis began to deport the children—along with their teachers, Krása, Hoffmeister, and Freudenfeld—to the newly established concentration camp at Theresienstadt.
During her first months in Theresienstadt, Alice was able to play chamber music concerts, but most of the string players were quickly transported to Auschwitz. In a strange way, despite the filth and hunger, her routine life of working an obligatory factory job, performing, caring for Rafi, and giving him and a few other children elementary piano lessons whenever she had a spare moment helped her never to lose hope. Meanwhile, Hans Krása decided to try to stage Brundibár again as a way of occupying and entertaining some of the thousands of children. Rudi Freudenfeld had smuggled his copy of the score with piano accompaniment into the camp, and Krása reorchestrated the opera for the thirteen available instrumentalists. A most unconventional ensemble, it included violin, cello, piano, accordion, and trumpet played by a mixture of old and young musicians. A ten-year-old boy from Denmark was chosen to play the trumpet part, an exceptionally difficult piece for his age. Freudenfeld taught the music to the children and conducted the performances.
Alice thought that Rafi might enjoy participating in the performance and asked Krása to arrange an audition for him. With his clear voice, perfect pitch, and excellent Czech diction, Rafi was given the small solo role of the sparrow, although at age seven he would be the youngest member of the cast.
Brundibár is a kind of moral fairy tale where good triumphs over evil. Two characters, Pepiček and Aninka, have a very sick mother. The doctor prescribes milk for her with the warning that without the milk she will soon die. But there is no money to buy it. Seeing the organ grinder Brundibár as he plays on the street corner, the children begin singing, hoping the villagers will throw coins to them. But the cruel Brundibár chases them away. Three animals—a dog, cat, and sparrow—come to their aid. Together with the neighborhood children, they sing a lullaby. People are impressed and reward them with coins, which Brundibár immediately steals from them. All the children and animals chase him and recover their bag of money. The opera ends with the children singing a marchlike song of victory over the evil Brundibár, a standin for Hitler.
The audience reveled in the opera’s allegorical protest. Since the Nazis had dictated that operas must be presented only in German, it is astonishing that they ignored the fact that all fifty-five performances of Brundibár were sung in Czech right under their noses. Most likely the Nazis did not trouble themselves to translate the libretto because they attached no significance to a work performed by Jewish children. Ironically the Nazis capitalized on the little opera for their own propaganda, featuring it in a performance for the Swiss Red Cross. In the 1944 propaganda film The Führer Gives the Jews a City, Rafi can be seen singing in the front row on the far left of the screen, standing on a box because he was the smallest member of the cast. Rafi loved being onstage. He would sometimes say, “When I grow up, I will be an actor.” Alice did not fail to notice that her son and the other children who performed in Brundibár were immensely strengthened by the experience. “When they were singing and acting the children could enter into the magic of theater and pretend they were back at home. They could ignore for a moment or two their hunger and fear,” she says.
Today Brundibár is the only world-class opera composed for performance by children. It is produced continually by opera companies and schools around the world.
Over time the prisoners discovered somewhat better pianos in the basements of the houses and warehouses and carried them into several of the larger rooms in the former city hall and the Magdeburg Barracks, where Brundibár was initially performed. And occasionally, when the camp was expecting a visit from an important person, the Nazis supplied something better from their storehouse of confiscated Jewish instruments. A gifted prisoner would do his best to tune and repair the pianos. By mid-1944 Alice’s allotted practice time was increased to two hours daily so that she could give more concerts. When she accompanied a soloist, Rafi would often turn the pages. He was so alert and accurate that he became a regular page turner for other artists as well.
Between the summer of 1943 and liberation, Alice played more than one hundred concerts, mostly solo recitals culled from memory from her extensive repertoire. When they first arrived at the camp, Leopold and Rafi usually sat together in the first row during her performances. Most often her program would include a Beethoven sonata, works by Chopin or Schumann, and several pieces by Czech composers. Viktor Ullmann and others would review Alice’s concerts. When he arrived in Theresienstadt, Ullmann was assigned to work for the Freizeitgestaltung (Free Time Organization) as a music critic and was also given the job of scheduling the pianists’ practice times. At concerts he could be seen scribbling in pencil on paper. Ullmann was allowed to type his essays in the Freizeitgestaltung’s office, where a few copies would be made for distribution to the artists. Before his deportation to Auschwitz, in 1944, he penned a tribute to thank Alice “for the many beautiful hours” she gave to all who listened. This article was discovered in a collection of twenty-seven of Ullmann’s reviews after the war.
Several times Alice performed all of the twenty-four Chopin études, a daunting task under the best circumstances. Another reviewer named her “Chopin’s Divine Mirror” and wrote, “Only one interpreter can make immortal in innate perfection the melancholy and sweetness of the young Chopin … the artist Mrs. Herz Sommer.” Anna Flachová, who was a young girl in the camp, credits Alice’s performance there with inspiring her to become a musician. After the war she studied piano and voice, and today she is a vocal coach in the conservatory in Brno.
“We were not competitive,” Alice explains. “We did our best to support and encourage each other and to dream together for our future. Sometime in 1944 a new pianist arrived who wanted to play Bach’s Italian Concerto in one of our joint concerts. Music scores were, of course, forbidden, and she did not have the piece memorized. Edith offered her help. She wrote out the entire piece by hand—all three movements—from memory.” Alice adds her favorite word of praise, “Extraordinary.” She smiles recalling Pavel Haas’s Three Chinese Songs, which he composed in the camp for the bass singer Karel Berman. “Haas was ingenious to write music on Chinese love poetry in a concentration camp.” The songs were such a success that after the war Berman would frequently be asked to sing them in memory of Haas in Prague.
Alice accompanied some of the rehearsals and thinks that she played for one or two of the performances of Verdi’s Requiem, which the conductor Rafael Schächter was preparing for the upcoming visit by the International Red Cross hosted by Adolf Eichmann. By mid-1944 not enough orchestra players were left to make up the large symphony required for the requiem—they had already been transported to Auschwitz. “Schächter had to conduct the requiem with only piano accompaniment—very difficult music for the pianist,” Alice explains. The conductor had managed to smuggle only one copy of the score into the camp, so he taught the singers the music and words by rote, and everyone sang the entire requiem from memory. And Schächter had to train a new choir at least three times, as the numbers were decimated by the deportations to Auschwitz. Alice never fails to mention that her friend Karel Berman sang the bass solos for all fifteen performances.<
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Some prisoners criticized Schächter for choosing a piece based on Christian text rather than a Jewish liturgical work, and many of the Czechs thought that he should have performed a work by a Czech composer. “Schächter and his singers felt strongly about the Verdi because it was modern and universal,” Alice says. Schächter’s final “command” performance was staged by the Nazis for the representatives of the International Red Cross on June 23, 1944.
On October 28 the last transport, with a cargo of two thousand Jews, left from Theresienstadt bound for Auschwitz. It arrived in time for most of its passengers to be processed into the gas chambers on October 30. On orders from Himmler, the gas chambers were then shut down. Bitterly aware that they were losing the war, he was anxious to destroy the evidence. By November 1944, most of Alice’s friends and colleagues—including the assistant concert-master of the Czech Philharmonic, the kindly Egon Ledeč, the conductor Rafael Schächter, and the composers Pavel Haas, Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krása, and Gideon Klein—had perished. Alice and her friend Edith Steiner-Kraus were the only two prominent pianists left in the camp. During the last few months of the war, Czech Jews who had previously been exempted because they were married to Aryans were deported to Theresienstadt. Alice’s brother Paul arrived in that group with his violin. As when they were children, Alice and Paul played recitals of Beethoven’s sonatas for violin and piano.
A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World's Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor Page 8