Zweig’s early portrayal of Hitler’s rise to power haunted Alice. She would ask herself over and over: how could Zweig’s vision have been so acute when most of the world took so little heed? “Nothing misled the German intellectuals as much as his lack of education into believing that Hitler was still only the beer-hall agitator who never could become a real danger,” Zweig wrote. “Then came the Reichstag fire, parliament disappeared, Goering let loose his hordes, and at one blow all of justice in Germany was smashed.… National Socialism in its unscrupulous technique of deceit was wary about disclosing the full extent of its aims before the world had become inured. Thus they practiced their method carefully: only a small dose to begin with then a brief pause … to see whether the world conscience would still digest this dose.… The doses became progressively stronger until all of Europe finally perished from them.” Still, “everybody had a ready-made phrase: That cannot last long.… It was the self deception that we practice because of reluctance to abandon our accustomed life.” Discussing Zweig’s account of those days, Alice says, “Ja, the world did not want to look at the truth until it was too late. And we should have known.”
When Alice later learned what had happened to Austria’s most famous writer, The World of Yesterday took on an even greater meaning for her. Zweig, a pacifist, had been reluctant to leave his home in Vienna, although the nation had become his avowed enemy. After fleeing for his life, he was given permanent residency in England, and he then spent time in the United States before deciding to settle in Petrópolis, Brazil, where he lived during his last five months. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, in 1941, Zweig believed that a dark curtain had descended and that Hitler and the reign of evil would conquer the world he knew. Without hope, unable to adapt to a new country, Zweig made a conscious decision to end his life. Alice wishes that he had been more patient, had not descended into total despair. “He was so wise, he could have given so much more,” she says. These thoughts helped to strengthen her resolve as she continued to face her own challenges. Alice muses that if Zweig had been older maybe he would have found more hope. Nodding her head, she murmurs, “Only when we are so very old do we realize the beauty of life.”
On a shelf Alice keeps two shoe boxes filled with her mementos. The first holds her remaining family photographs: her wedding picture taken outside Prague’s City Hall, a photo of her brother Paul, several snapshots of herself before the war, and a tiny black-and-white image of her mother as a young woman. A small plaque in the box was given to Alice by the government of Israel—she recalls neither the occasion nor the purpose of the award. A bearded man in a small photograph, probably taken by her mother, turns out to be Sigmund Freud. Freud had been born in Moravia and had met Sofie through mutual family friends in Vienna. In the late 1920s, when Alice and her mother visited a relative in Vienna, where he was living at the time near Freud’s office on the Berggasse, they would often run into Freud on their walks, and the famous doctor would always stop to exchange a few words with them. The second box holds two four-by-six-inch scrapbooks, which have survived the war and Alice’s relocation to two new countries. Most of the pages are covered with small clippings from the Czech German newspaper, which Alice had carefully pasted onto the pages, reviews of her concerts.
Alice admits that through the years she has given away many of her keepsakes, and that nearly everything she collected before the war has been lost. Still, she is grateful for the few photographs she has around her. And her lifeline, her Steinway piano. “They make me happy. Every day. What is lost? Sometimes people bring me a little picture or a letter, an envelope.…” She pauses. “It does not matter. My memories are always with me. My life is in my mind.”
Remembering her study of ancient Greek philosophers, Alice quotes, “Memory is the scribe of the soul.” As she taps her forehead with the third finger of her right hand, she whispers, “Here.”
INTERLUDE
Old Age
“It’s not so bad!” Alice says in her most dramatic way about her advanced age. “When people come to visit, people much younger than myself, many like to tell me how bad things are, their money problems, their aches and pains. And worst of all they tell me how terrible old age is. ‘It’s so terrible, so terrible.’ And I shock them by disagreeing. ‘It’s not so terrible. And I’m older than you. Rather than dwell on problems, why not look for life’s gifts?’ Every day is a present. Beautiful.”
She says that, just because she is old in years, she is not irrelevant. And more insistently Alice says, “My mind is young. My emotions and my imagination are still young.” Then with a whimsical bit of laughter, “Of course, I do have some experience.”
Alice becomes even more animated in the presence of attractive young men; she enjoys admitting, “You cannot see the real me inside my wrinkled skin, the life of my emotions. What you see is only the outer face of a very old woman.”
When a Czech Television crew arrived at her London home for an interview in the summer of 2006, Alice was neatly dressed in a pale blue knit skirt and matching short-sleeved sweater. As always she was wearing canvas sneakers. That day she had chosen white ones. The chief cameraman and the director, both in their late twenties, were over six feet tall and handsome. She greeted them in Czech, giggling girlishly, and insisted that they help themselves to the tea and cookies that she had already laid out; she then excused herself quickly. About ten minutes later a vivacious Alice reappeared wearing red sneakers, red lipstick, and a necklace. Later, when asked what was the single most important thing in the world, a most serious Alice answered, “Love, love, of course.” Then, pausing to laugh heartily, she wagged her finger at the director and added, “But I don’t mean sex.”
Alice is always ready for something new: a new thought, a new book, a new idea, new people. Her curiosity is insatiable. Well beyond an age when many begin to turn away from everything different or unfamiliar, she welcomes nearly everything innovative. Alice recently asked to try Jacqueline Danson’s iPhone. Jackie, the granddaughter of a Czech friend, watched fascinated as Alice’s 107-year-old finger manipulated the keypad. And when Alice lies in bed, she exercises her mind by mentally playing entire pieces. While she is sitting and talking, her fingers move continually. When asked what she is playing, she quips, “Bach, of course.”
Even though Alice has no desire for anything materialistic and has probably not bought new clothes in decades, she is both interested in and aware of fashion. She notices what others wear, touches the fabric, and offers compliments. And her attitude on sex is nothing short of astonishing considering her age and background. Her former student Ester Maron recently introduced Alice to her daughter Michal, who is in her late twenties. Learning that the girl was a cellist in the Haifa Symphony, Alice asked her if there was a man in her life. Michal replied that she had just broken up with her most recent boyfriend. “Good,” Alice said. “Keep it that way. Have sex, have fun, have someone in your life, but don’t tie yourself down in marriage. Cherish your freedom and your music.” In fact, whenever Alice learns that a young woman or an older single woman has a lover, she gives unsolicited advice: “Oh, that is good, but make certain that he lives in his own place. You should see him only when and if it is good for you. Keep your freedom, take care of your career, your life.” Spinoza seems to be present, like a shadow, whispering in Alice’s ear as her guide. Her favorite philosopher wrote that sexual passion usually leads to unhappiness. He felt that if a love is to last it must be based on reason and friendship rather than uncontrolled passions.
Today Alice follows Spinoza’s profound directive: “Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.” She believes that understanding is the pillar of all learning and the essential foundation for peace—in our hearts, our cities, and our world. Before people rush to confront a neighbor, before soldiers rush to fight, “can’t we try first to understand each other?” she asks. “Since when has making enemies been a solution?” Having lived through so many wars, Alice is hardly naïve
when she talks about understanding. She is aware that you do not need to like or agree with someone in order to understand his point of view. Alice emphasizes, “Don’t stand there and cry. Understand.”
For Alice the philosopher, Spinoza vindicated her thoughts in his many volumes on reason. As she faces what are inevitably the last years of her life, she does not fritter away her cherished time with fears of death and worries about the unknown. Death, for Alice, is not unfamiliar. Again she accepts Spinoza’s reasoning that death and life are part of the same infinity or God. According to Alice, “We come from and return to Infinity.” She adds that she believes that “the soul lives on without the body.” As she listens repeatedly to Mahler’s Second Symphony, Alice finds consolation in the song for alto soloist, “Urlicht” (primal light), at the beginning of the fourth movement. Perhaps for Alice “Urlicht”—with its opening words “I come from God and I will return to God”—has always been her spiritual theme song. Loosely quoting Spinoza, she says, “Things are as they are supposed to be. I am still here—never too old so long as I breathe to wonder, to learn, and, yes, still to teach. Curiosity—interest in others, and, above all, music. This is life.”
ELEVEN
Man in the Glass Booth
On an April morning in Jerusalem in 1961, walking arm in arm with her friend Edith Steiner-Kraus—the pianist who had accompanied many of the performances of Verdi’s Requiem in Theresienstadt—Alice entered the heavily guarded chambers of the opening of the trial of Nazi SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, and the two women took their designated seats. Alice had never before been in a courtroom.
The head prosecutor for the trial, Gideon Hausner, attorney general for the State of Israel, had invited her to attend the proceedings. She and Hausner had met through his daughter, who was one of Alice’s youngest piano students. After her lessons Hausner, himself a remarkable pianist, would frequently sit with Alice and play duets for fun. Although he was not a criminal lawyer, Hausner had drafted the indictment against Eichmann, charging him with multiple counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Golda Meir, then foreign minister, explained that the trial “was not, in any sense, a question of revenge … but those who remained alive—and generations still unborn—deserve, if nothing else, that the world know, in all its dreadful detail, what was done to the Jews of Europe and by whom.” The Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, as a young journalist, covered the trial for the Jewish newspaper The Forward. Later he wrote in his Memoirs, “If only the defendant could be declared irrevocably inhuman, expelled from the human species. It irritated me to think of Eichmann as human.”
In Beit Ha’am, a large auditorium temporarily outfitted as the courtroom for this singular trial, before three presiding judges, Eichmann sat in a bulletproof glass booth specially constructed by the Israelis for his protection against the anger of the crowd. It was the first trial to be broadcast worldwide on television.
SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann was three years younger than Alice. His ordinary middle-class German family had attended services at the Lutheran church every Sunday. Although he was never more than a mediocre student and eventually dropped out of high school, Eichmann was noted for his exceptional obedience to authority. Mesmerized by the nationalistic fervor of its members, he had joined the Nazi Party in 1932, and when he lost his menial job working for a subsidiary of Standard Oil, he found employment and a new career in the feared and powerful SS. He was a man they could trust. Eichmann married a German woman and lived for several years in Prague as he quickly advanced from sergeant to lieutenant colonel, to the top of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. By 1939 he was back in Berlin, where he was appointed the head of Gestapo Section IV B4, or Jewish Affairs. The SS had discovered his talent for organization and, more important, his ambition to succeed no matter the task. In 1942 Eichmann was given the new position of transportation administrator of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question; he controlled all the trains and managed the logistics of the mass deportations of Jews across Europe to Hitler’s death camps. He planned the seizure and disposition of Jewish property to make certain that his office benefited from the profits. Eichmann alone decided how many, in what order, in which countries, and when the Jews would be murdered.
And Eichmann was personally responsible for the establishment of Theresienstadt as a way station to hold Jews he would efficiently deliver to Auschwitz and other death camps. He made more than one inspection tour of his model camp. Alice’s brother Paul, who was in a small orchestra that was ordered to perform for the Nazi high command, saw Eichmann during his final visit, in late 1944.
Israeli intelligence finally caught up with Eichmann fifteen years after the war. He had escaped Germany with the help of officials of the Catholic Church and had been living in Buenos Aires under an assumed name, Ricardo Klement, with his wife, Vera, and four sons. A Mossad agent named Peter Malkin had been observing his movements for several days before his capture. Watching him come home from work and get down on the floor to play with his youngest child, Malkin found the scene particularly disturbing—it was so ordinary. After Eichmann was caught getting off a bus on his way home from work, Malkin spent hours talking with him. Malkin had lost his parents and many other relatives in the Holocaust, and he wanted to know how any human being could have conceived of and committed such atrocities. Eichmann showed no emotion and insisted that he had never killed anyone. It was a known fact that near the end of the war Himmler had ordered the killing to stop and the evidence to be destroyed. Enraged, Eichmann had defied the Reichsführer’s orders and had sped up the deportations of thousands of Hungarian Jews marked for death.
Eichmann repeatedly claimed, “I was just responsible for transportation.” Malkin told him that his own cousin, his best childhood friend, was six years old and had blond hair and blue eyes just like Eichmann’s son when Eichmann “killed him in Auschwitz.” According to Malkin, Eichmann commented, “Yes, but he was Jewish, wasn’t he?”
Without apology or regret, Eichmann would stick to his defense that he was only a “transmitter.” Elie Wiesel later wrote, “I could not take my eyes off the defendant, who sat in his glass cage impassively taking notes. He seemed utterly unmoved by the recitation of the crimes against humanity and the Jewish people of which he was accused. He looked like an ordinary man. I was told he ate heartily and slept normally. Considering the crushing pressures of the trial, he seemed to bear up well. Neither the prosecutors nor the judges were able to break him.” Wiesel went on, “The accused Eichmann spoke freely, unafraid. He cited documents and figures, he held back nothing—he was desperately bent on saving his neck.”
Portraying himself as only a bureaucrat who was powerless, Eichmann testified: “I never did anything, great or small, without obtaining in advance express instructions from Adolf Hitler or any of my superiors.” At one point he even said, “I regret nothing.” During his trial, he acknowledged the trait of obedience that his parents had instilled in him: “Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one’s need to think.”
When Hausner cross-examined the defendant, he asked if Eichmann considered himself guilty of the murder of millions of Jews. Eichmann replied: “Legally not, but in the human sense … yes, for I am guilty of having deported them.”
Alice listened to survivors describe inconceivable horrors far worse than what she had experienced in the Theresienstadt ghetto. Dressed in civilian clothes, a suit and tie—he was forbidden to wear his Nazi uniform and decorations—Eichmann looked coldly arrogant. Alice searched his face and posture for some sign of remorse. Even as Hausner produced as evidence a quote by Eichmann stating, “I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction,” the defendant seemed proud of his role and his exemplary discharge of duties for the Third Reich.
The political philosopher Hannah Arendt, herself a refugee from Nazi Germany, who covered the trial for The New Yorker magazine, said that she found Eichmann perfectly normal, only blindly ambitious. The SS offered him the unimaginable respect and power that he could not attain in a civil society. Explaining the “banality of evil,” Arendt wrote, “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.… The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
Although the trial lasted sixteen weeks, Alice attended for a mere handful of days. She found to her horror that she was feeling pity, not only for the wasted, destructive life of the heartless man in the glass box but also for the entire German nation. The Germans had awarded Sigmund Freud their distinguished Goethe Prize for literature in 1930, and only three years later, because he was Jewish, the Nazis had marked his writings for burning. Freud had escaped at the last moment to England, his name joining a small list of other great Jewish intellects who had managed to flee: Martin Buber to Palestine, Albert Einstein and others to America.
Alice thought of Goethe’s words memorized in her childhood: “Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.” What had gone so wrong in the educated culture and nations of Beethoven, Schiller, Goethe, and Zweig, the world and ideals of her youth? Alice would come to agree with Hannah Arendt that “there is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.” Later the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber would equate the rise of Nazism with an eclipse of God.
A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World's Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor Page 10