Alice believes that, despite the conditions in the camp and the inadequate, broken-down, legless instruments provided for concerts, emotionally she may have given her finest interpretations of Beethoven’s and Schubert’s sonatas in Theresienstadt. The music in her mind and under her fingers was her only possession. Proudly and carefully she prepared each program so that her audience of prisoners could experience the splendor and richness of life that was denied to them in the camp. “We were not heroic,” Alice says. “We improvised. We managed to keep doing, keep working as usual. To not practice was unthinkable.”
In that bizarre make-do concert hall, Alice played for some of the most distinguished audiences of her life. Clinging to their own humanity, Alice’s close friend Rabbi Leo Baeck and his friend and colleague Dr. Viktor Frankl were always seated near the stage. People who otherwise would have heard her performances only in the great concert halls of Europe gratefully sat crowded with children and ordinary citizens, including Henry Kissinger’s aunt Minna, Sigmund Freud’s sister Adolfine, Franz Kafka’s sister Ottla, and nearly the entire Czech musical establishment.
As Alice says, “Music was our food. This I can say. When we have something spiritual, maybe we don’t need food. Music was life. We did not, could not, would not give up.”
NINE
The Führer Gives the Jews a City
Alice shakes her head as she recalls the spring of 1944. “The Nazis announced what they called the Theresienstadt ‘beautification project’ in preparation for the inspection tour of the Red Cross on June 23. They told us that we would all need to work harder to be proud of our city. We [prisoners] laughed. We knew that it was a trick.”
The International Red Cross had been pressuring the Nazis to allow an inspection of Theresienstadt for some time. They had been tipped off to the fact that the prisoners were not as well treated as reported by the Germans. The Nazis finally agreed to a visit by three representatives, one from the Danish Red Cross and two from the Swiss Red Cross. It was to be tightly controlled; the representatives would not be free to wander about or to talk directly to prisoners. The SS would escort their guests at all times, showing them only preselected, specially prepared buildings and rehearsed scenes.
Although the German Army was retreating on all fronts, the secret war on the Jews was being sped up. The designers of the Final Solution were dedicated to finishing what they had started—the total destruction of the Jews. Still, the Nazi high command, anxious to protect their own skins, wanted to deceive the West about their intentions regarding their “Jewish problem.” The Nazis thought that they could surely dupe the Red Cross during their one-day “spa” visit but felt they needed a still grander propaganda campaign. Concurrent with the prisoners’ hard labor on the “beautification” project, the Nazis discovered their propaganda weapon in Kurt Gerron, one of Germany’s most famous actors and screen directors. And, of course, they gave their word of honor to Gerron, a Jew, that he and his wife would not be sent to Auschwitz.
Gerron played a major role in Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera with his indelible delivery of the opening song, “Mack the Knife,” at the premiere in Berlin in 1928. He became a film star after his role as Kiepert, the magician, in Germany’s first major sound film, The Blue Angel with Marlene Dietrich. Already incarcerated in Theresienstadt, he was ordered to make a film depicting the Nazi lies of the “beautiful life” that the Führer provided for the Jews in the spa town. SS officers were on the set at all times, barking orders to Gerron. They wanted a scene of Jews laughing at a theatrical performance. But the prisoners would not, could not, laugh. As the SS pressure increased, a terrified, sweating Gerron begged his prisoner-actors to laugh on command for the camera. Relying on his directorial instincts, Gerron began to wobble his fat belly in such a way that he elicited uproarious laughter for a few rare moments. Later Kurt Gerron would bear the dubious distinction of directing the only known film made inside an operational concentration camp.
While he prepared to shoot, all aspects of the Nazi hoax rapidly progressed. Jewish slave labor was forced to paint the interiors and exteriors of the buildings that would be showcased. In order to avoid the appearance of overcrowding, the Gestapo rushed 7,503 older and sick prisoners to their deaths in Auschwitz between May 16 and May 18, 1944. The third bunks were temporarily removed from the beds in one of the women’s buildings. Curtains were added to the windows, and books were strewn about temporary tables to create a homey environment. Trees and flowers were planted, street and building signs with German names were erected. Even a bank was opened that distributed fake and worthless Theresienstadt bills. Suddenly there was a Main Street with a beauty shop and café, a bakery and a coffee shop stocked with spectacular goods, including mouthwatering petits fours and a tiered wedding cake that the starving prisoners were forbidden to touch. The streets the Red Cross officials would walk had been scrubbed with brushes, soap, and water by prisoners on their hands and knees. But all was a sham, a fake movie set, which would be destroyed as soon as the film was completed and the representatives of the Red Cross had departed.
As word of the Nazi propaganda film spread throughout the camp, many prisoners advised Gerron to refuse to cooperate. Although he did protest, he hoped that making the film would put off his deportation to Auschwitz, and he hoped that his carefully crafted images would be able to convey the truth behind the sham. In addition, his depressed mood improved when he found himself working once again in his profession. He immediately wrote a script. His original storyboards, approved by the Nazis, were discovered in Theresienstadt after the war.
Gerron insisted on hiring one of Czechoslovakia’s finest cameramen, Ivan Frič, and his crew from Prague. The Nazis complied, although they probably feared that the truth of their enterprise would be endangered by civilian Czech exposure to the camp. The director, however, countered that he needed the experienced crew in order to make the film they wanted.
All of the more than thirty thousand prisoners left in Theresienstadt were affected by the production of the film. Many who appeared even fleetingly in the film wrongly believed that by cooperating they would be saved. Prisoners were assigned work as makeup artists and hairdressers. Most of the prisoners, including those who were simply members of the audience at concerts or a soccer game, were given costumes culled from the extensive Nazi warehouses of the confiscated belongings of the dead. But dress shoes for the orchestra were in short supply; so many shoes had been sent to Greater Germany to be given to civilians who had lost everything in bombing raids that not enough pairs in diverse sizes were available. Gerron solved that problem by placing flowerpots around the edge of the stage, hiding the players’ feet.
Although most of the film was shot in Theresienstadt between August and September, it appears that Gerron either filmed part of the Red Cross visit in June or inserted available Nazi footage taken that day. His film includes the carefully rehearsed act of a Jewish boy running into the street after a ball. A uniformed Nazi catches the ball and gives it to the child with a friendly pat on his head. A few weeks later, that same child was murdered in Auschwitz.
While the representative of the Danish Red Cross was not deluded by the charade, the Swiss delegation accepted it. The Swiss issued their report concurring with the Nazis that the Jews were relatively well off compared with German civilians who lived in bombed-out cities.
The king of Denmark, Christian X, reacted differently. He demanded that the 466 Danish Jews of Theresienstadt be released and safely returned to Denmark. The Nazis acquiesced, and a convoy of white buses and ambulances crossed front lines to try to rescue all of the Danish prisoners. But it was too late for the fifty Danes who had already died in the camp. Paul Sanford, the twelve-year-old Danish orphan who had played the trumpet part in the orchestra accompanying the performances of Brundibár, was one of the prisoners saved by his nation’s successful intervention.
Even after the Red Cross officials had departed, through the summer of 1944 and until the
end of the filming, Gerron walked a tenuous line, trying to satisfy the Nazis’ demands and at the same time to expose the truth. Regardless of the background or the scenes of a well-dressed population, with close-up shots Gerron was able to depict the depressed, lifeless faces around him. As an audience listened to Study for Strings, which Pavel Haas had written for the occasion and which was conducted by Karel Ančerl, who survived to become the conductor of the Toronto Symphony, Gerron captured their haunting eyes and their despair. One of Theresienstadt’s most illustrious prisoners, Alice’s friend Rabbi Leo Baeck, was shown in a staged lecture. The background music was the aching melancholy of the slow movement of Mendelssohn’s Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello in D Minor, otherwise banned by the Nazis throughout occupied Europe. The footage also included a few frames of a pretty girl who turned toward the camera with a stilted smile as she watered a garden. There were vacant stares on the faces of the elderly as they sat on “park benches” purportedly enjoying the view and terrified looks of the youngest children, who were anxiously riding hobby horses as if they were trying to gallop into the arms of their mothers, who had already disappeared. In a shot of the audience for Brundibár, Gerron focused on a skinny boy who was not wearing a shirt. And even in the normally joyful final scene of the opera, the unsmiling children looked frightened and hopeless as they mechanically sang the chorus. The truth of Gerron’s film shone through for anyone who had the courage to see.
As soon as Gerron wrapped the film, on orders from Reich Minister of Propaganda Dr. Joseph Goebbels, a sealed train left Theresienstadt bearing its final cargo of more than two thousand prisoners who had participated in the production. When the train came to a stop in Auschwitz, the doors were unlatched and the name Gerron was blasted from the bullhorns.
“Kurt Gerron, heraus” (get out). The other prisoners watched as Gerron made his way out of the cattle car and into the hands of SS guards. According to eyewitnesses, he looked neither right nor left. Gerron had been singled out for “special treatment,” on orders from Gestapo headquarters, to make certain the director would not talk. With his head held high and without looking back, Gerron was marched directly into the gas chamber. He was forty-seven. Miraculously the bass soloist Karel Berman was one of the very few on that transport to survive Auschwitz.
Gerron’s film was edited in Prague, and a copy was sent to Berlin, where it was destroyed before Germany surrendered. It was only in late 1945 that the chief cameraman, Ivan Frič, who had been partially protected from the murderous truths of Theresienstadt, learned what had happened to Gerron and the masses of Czechs in the film.
After the war, fragments of the film Frič shot for Gerron—including scenes from Brundibár and Haas’s piece for string orchestra—were found in a Czech production house. Researchers continue to discover additional pieces of the film in archives, so someday most of Gerron’s film may be pieced together from the extant storyboards.
Today Alice asks, “How can anyone look at the faces in the film without seeing the truth?” Answering her own question, she adds, “We all see only what we want to see.” In the words that one courageous prisoner managed to whisper to one of the Red Cross visitors: “Open your eyes. See what they do not show. Look.”
TEN
Snapshots
Alice lives amid her few remaining photographs and mementos. Her one-room flat, humble in its timeworn simplicity, is a kind of cocoon carrying her memories forward day by day. Her furniture is a collection of unmatched items, from the upholstered green velour chair to the metal tables that look as if they are discards from someone else on moving day. Her antique Steinway upright piano is centered against the long wall. Without design, each visible remembrance intertwines with another, invoking a portrait of Alice’s life.
When one first enters Alice’s studio apartment, a large framed portrait of a dashing, youngish man wearing an eye patch catches the eye. It is a photograph of Alice’s most beloved piano teacher, Václav Štěpán. He had lost his left eye in an accident in the military during World War I, but in no way did this injury hinder his artistry; in fact, Štěpán could deliver lengthy explanations of the value of limited vision for musicians. He was regarded as one of Czechoslovakia’s finest and most daring pianists and was highly sought after as a teacher for both piano and composition.
Štěpán was one of the first people Alice tried to find when she returned to Prague in 1945, and she was heartbroken to learn that he had died of cancer shortly before the city’s liberation. Professor Štěpán was so influential—musically and personally—to her that she even named her baby after him. Štěpán’s widow had given the framed photograph to Alice as a memento.
In addition to Štěpán’s portrait, there are pictures of Rafi everywhere in Alice’s room. The center photograph on her piano shows Rafi with Pablo Casals and was taken in the summer of 1965 at the acclaimed Marlboro Music Festival. Rafi had played in a performance of Bach’s Suite no. 2 in B Minor conducted by Casals. Two weeks later Rafi was the cellist for the Boccherini Quintet, and this time Casals was a member of his audience. Alice was more thrilled than Rafi when he wrote to her about the concerts; she understood how lasting the time in the presence of the great Casals could be. When she wrote back to her son in the States, she reminded him to keep careful notes each day. He must remember every word the maestro uttered.
The weeks Rafi spent at Marlboro, working with the greatest musicians from across the globe in the forested Green Mountains of Vermont, were unforgettable. Founded by Rudolf Serkin to promote chamber music concerts in his new country, the festival was uniquely democratic in that the young artists played in ensembles with the great and the famous. Serkin, who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1903, the same year as Alice, was already a world-famous pianist; he and several members of his family had been fortunate to escape to the United States in 1939. Rafi never told Serkin that he was a Holocaust survivor. For Rafi, the experience was all about music. The violinist Jaime Laredo vividly remembers Rafi not only as a fine cellist but as an ebullient young man full of humor.
A Hanukkah menorah stands prominently among the photographs on Alice’s piano like an honor guard, the only symbol of Jewish life that she brought from Israel when she immigrated. Geneviève, Rafi’s widow, describes Alice joyfully lighting the candles for the eight nights of Hanukkah—the word itself means dedication—for her son and her grandchildren, just as her family did when she was a child in Prague. On the wall next to the piano is a drawing of a string quartet that includes two members of Alice’s family, reworked from a prewar photograph: her brother Paul is playing first violin, and her husband, Leopold, is on second violin. According to Alice it was a first-rate amateur quartet whose Thursday night rehearsals were never to be missed.
A stack of old musical scores sits on the faded green velvet seat of the piano bench. More music is piled on the floor, and standing open above the piano keys is a large hardbound score, its fragile yellowed pages showing rips and tears from endless use. It is the piano part of Beethoven’s Spring sonata for violin and piano. Alice played this sonata many times with violinists in European concerts before the war; in Theresienstadt she performed it with violinists who had been members of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra; and in Israel she played it often as well. In London, Alice still returns repeatedly to this work. “Beethoven is a miracle,” she says. “Beethoven is not only melody, he is full, deep—intense.” She explains that in the piece the violin and the piano are engaged in a democratic dialogue. The theme is tossed back and forth, intertwining the instruments in respectful and intimate conversation. Each instrument plays an equal role. Neither stands alone, nor can one exist without the other. Alice points out that Beethoven did not title the work “Spring”—the nickname became popular soon after the sonata was published, probably because of its sunny, tender melodies.
Above Alice’s single bed are two small but colorful oil paintings of the hills of Jerusalem, a reminder of the land that gave her refuge and a fresh start,
and where she spent her happiest years. Nothing in the room serves as a reminder of her Czech roots; she feels few personal ties with the city of her childhood. Her home, her school, and her family have all disappeared.
On the wall directly across from her bed is an unframed oil painting of her son with his cello. Edna, one of Alice’s multigifted piano students in Jerusalem, painted the lifelike oil from a photograph. Rafi’s pensive face is the first image Alice sees in the morning and the last before she closes her eyes at night. She says that the painting brings her so close to her son that she can nearly hear the sound of his cello. Edna flew to London from Israel to give the portrait to Alice for her hundredth birthday.
A closer look around the room shows that mementos of Rafi dominate the space. Stored under the television are videotapes of Rafi playing his cello or conducting. And even the small white electric fan that rests on top of books is a reminder of him. Rafi gave it to her to help her get through hot days more comfortably. Alice says that nearly every week she would receive a present from her son. Tossed over the back of her chair are woolen throws and a shawl Rafi gave her for the extra cold days.
A few books on music, along with books by Franz Kafka and the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s World of Yesterday, are within easy reach on the small table beside Alice’s bed. Zweig’s book, which she has read and reread countless times, was a gift from her beloved Michal Mareš, who gave it to her in 1945. Through the many intervening years, in Israel and in London, The World of Yesterday has been her constant companion. Originally published in German in Sweden in 1943—it had been banned in all Nazi-occupied countries because the author was Jewish—initially the book was for Alice a connection to her past, a beautiful portrayal of the world of her childhood, in which music, literature, and the life of the mind were revered. As a young woman Alice had even met Zweig, who was connected to her circle through his friendship with Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss.
A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World's Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor Page 9