A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World's Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor

by Caroline Stoessinger

  But the intense anger of the crowd both in and outside the courtroom as they waited impatiently for justice to be served also disturbed Alice. What was justice? Buber and many others had argued against the death penalty for Eichmann. No court in the world could bring back the lives that had been lost. Sadness overwhelmed Alice. Schiller’s words flooded her: “Wouldst thou know thyself, observe the actions of others. Wouldst thou other men know, look thou within thine own heart.”

  Unable to voice her feelings, Alice left the court.

  She spent the rest of the day and evening in her private form of prayer, playing her piano. She played Bach—whom she named the philosopher of music—finding perfection in his most minute twists and turns. “No matter how many years you have known one work of Bach or how many hours you have practiced, you can always strive to reach a higher level. Bach is a whole universe. Infinite,” she explains. She found similarities between life in all of its unforeseen highs and lows and his music: his uncanny dissonances, which might be inserted in passing on the way to a resolution and are sometimes nearly unnoticeable, and which in other phrases are proclaimed in a momentary burst of joy. Beyond spoken language, beyond national borders, beyond worldly concerns, beyond hate, music was her language, the language of humanity. Bach brought Alice to a state of peace. Later she would frequently say, “Music brings us to paradise.”

  Alice is convinced that we are not genetically programmed to hate one another. But she now recognizes that anyone, anywhere, and at any time can adopt hatred and, worse, can infect others with its venom. Hatred that may begin with one person, like a single pebble cast into a lake, can spread to larger and larger groups, and even to entire nations. While the Holocaust ended with the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, Alice observes that the world has changed very little since then. The metamorphosis of individual prejudice into group hatred and killing is still happening in the twenty-first century. Remembering her own first encounter with hatred as a child, when a stranger called her a “dirty Jew,” Alice emphasizes, “Each individual can choose good or evil. It is up to us, each one of us.” She thinks of the famous Protestant composer Max Bruch, who, when criticized for using racial slurs, answered, “I only said what everyone else was saying.”

  Alice never tires of pointing out, “We are responsible for our actions and our words. And each of us must vigilantly guard against prejudice and hatred in our own minds and with the words that fall from our lips. No one is exempt. No one. Hitler could not have come to power except in the climate of excessive hatred.”

  While her words may appear simplistic, the deeper truth she divines is undisputable. “Hatred only begets hatred.”

  TWELVE

  No Harsh Words

  “How can any woman ever be unhappy after she has seen her infant’s first smile? This is a miracle. My son’s birth was the happiest day of my life. My most awe-inspiring moment was when I saw my baby smile for the first time.” The philosopher in Alice adds, “He was happy because he did not know unhappiness. He did not want for things he did not need. I can say that it was my greatest privilege to raise my son.” Although Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany four years before Rafi was born in 1937, Alice was determined that as long as she lived she would be strong for her son. “A mother’s love is the child’s only fortress against the world, come what may,” she says.

  As a baby, Rafi would sleep peacefully while Alice practiced. By the time he was three years old he would make his own fingers fly about in imitation of his mother’s hands. One day he was busy playing his imaginary piano while Alice was rehearsing songs by Schumann with a singer when he suddenly began to cry. “What is wrong? What happened?” Alice asked as she lifted him onto her lap. Sobbing he said, “The music is so beautiful.” For the rest of the rehearsal Rafi sat quietly between his mother’s arms as she played. That evening Alice told her husband what had happened. “Our son is talented,” she announced to Leopold.

  At that time, the majority of traditional European parents believed in strict, even harsh discipline of their children. Alice was different. She accepted her sensitive child as a full human being. From the beginning Alice was aware that the tone of her voice and every word she uttered could influence her growing son.

  Alice became a single mother after Rafi’s seventh birthday, when her husband was sent on to Auschwitz and she and Rafi remained in Theresienstadt. Until the war ended she raised her son in the concentration camp, surrounded by filth, disease, and death. “The hardest thing for me in the camp was to listen to my child cry from hunger and have nothing, nothing to give to him,” she recalls. “This was terrible. And his questions. How should I answer? Rafi continually asked, ‘What is war?’ ‘Why can’t we go home?’ ‘What is a Jew?’ ‘Why are we Jews?’ ”

  Since Rafi was only six when they arrived in Theresienstadt, Alice was permitted to keep him with her in the women’s quarters. They slept together in her narrow wooden bunk. As the days turned into weeks and months, Alice understood this significant blessing. “When a child is held close to you and can sense the warmth of your body, the child feels secure.” This, she explains, is true regardless of the circumstances, but in Theresienstadt it was critical for her child’s well-being. After the war, when Alice read the philosophy of Martin Buber, his words affirmed her belief: “The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.” After Leopold was deported to Auschwitz, Rafi would often voice his constant fear, “Now that Papa is gone, if they take you away I will be all alone in this world.” “Alone in this world,” Alice repeats. “How did this little boy have the idea of a larger world?” She assured Rafi that she would never leave him, and in comforting her son, she intensified her own determination to survive. Protecting Rafi became her mission. “I made up stories constantly. I was laughing. Never did I let my son see my fear or worry. And tears had no place in a concentration camp. Laughter was our only medicine.”

  When Alice and Rafi had first entered Theresienstadt’s gates, in 1943, soldiers with drawn machine guns guarded the entrance. Fortunately the Nazi guard did not understand Czech when Rafi announced in his loudest voice, “Mommy, I don’t like it here. I want to go home.” From that moment Alice invented fairy tales and stories to quell his anxiety and pass the time. She asked him to imagine that they were onstage in a play. The bad witch had forced them to take the wrong train, and they were waiting for the good soldiers to rescue them. When Rafi saw his mother smiling and even laughing through it all, he could only think things must not be so bad. When they ate the watery soup that was served for both lunch and dinner, Alice told a story of a king’s banquet where they were given all they could eat. Rafi joined in and pretended he was eating mounds of potatoes and dozens of his favorite chocolates.

  But Rafi was also full of daring childish energy. To save his life, Alice managed to discipline him with reason, not punishment. “Giving your child instructions in a serious tone is very different from using angry sounding words,” she explains. For Alice harsh words send a message that is dismissive and unloving. To survive, “a child must never, never doubt your love.”

  When Rafi was offered the role of the sparrow in Brundibár, the conductor, Rudi Freudenfeld, was surprised at how quickly and perfectly on pitch he learned his solo. Working in the factory, Alice could not supervise him during the rehearsals, so the job of watching over the rambunctious boy fell to fourteen-year-old Ela Weissberger—who sang the role of the cat—and to several of her friends. Yet Rafi never missed his moment to sing, and he never missed a note.

  After the war Alice refused to talk to anyone about their days in the concentration camp because she feared that Rafi might overhear their conversation, and she wanted him to forget those horrific years. Years later, when Rafi reconnected with Ela as an adult, he asked her, “Tell me how I was in Brundibár. I remember nothing.”

  Rafi learned by example; he never used harsh words with his mother. He quickly adapted to his new home and ne
w culture in Israel. He excelled in school and absorbed Hebrew like a sponge, and he was always interested in the world around him. Alice never needed to remind him to do his homework or to practice. Because of his mother’s work schedule, he spent many hours alone. He learned not only to accept solitude but to relish it. When he decided that he wanted to have a Bar Mitzvah, he worked hard with his tutor, and he was rewarded with a shiny new bicycle.

  Until he left home for his military service, Rafi would begin every day, before school, with an hour’s piano lesson with his mother. He also studied cello at the Jerusalem Academy of Music. According to Alice, “He was an excellent pianist, excellent.” She loves to relate how he wowed his fellow students when, barely age ten, he played not one but two Beethoven sonatas in a school program. Yet he was drawn more to the rich voice of the cello. His progress on that instrument was so rapid that, by the time he was in high school, he was capable of performing much of the difficult repertoire.

  The year 1954 was Rafi’s lucky year. The renowned French cellist Paul Tortelier, a Catholic, was compelled to move, at least temporarily, to a kibbutz with his wife, two children, two students, his mother, and his sister. When Tortelier had played a concert in Israel, Vera Stern, the wife of the violinist Isaac Stern, suggested that they visit her favorite kibbutz, Ma’abarot, near Netanya, between Tel Aviv and Haifa. Tortelier and his wife, Maud, fell in love with the kibbutz’s beauty and tranquillity, while the ideals of the new Israeli nation exerted a powerful pull on them. Not only did he want to help in some way to build the country but he turned down an entire year of concerts in order to work unpaid picking grapefruits and bananas in the orchards of Kibbutz Ma’abarot and serving dinner once a week. And of course he continued to teach. Tortelier would later describe the experience in his autobiography: “We began a simple life: just love and work … the man who collected rubbish was on an equal status with a professor of science. Everyone wore the same clothes, ate the same food and was treated equally. For a man like me … such a life is ideal.… You have whatever you need because … you don’t need so much in life. We acquire a lot of unnecessary things whether through fear, temptation or habit.… It was wonderful to experience … the radiant contact between people who share daily the same love of nature, work and beauty in complete equality and simplicity.”

  Rafi’s cello teacher arranged his audition. Encouraged by his mother, Rafi traveled two hours by bus on dusty roads to play for the great cellist, who was instantly fascinated by the young man’s talent and musicianship. After giving him a trial lesson, Tortelier advised Rafi to complete his high school studies in Jerusalem and then come to France to study with him at the Paris Conservatory. Tortelier added the promise of a scholarship.

  Rafi received the grant from the conservatory in 1958. But he and Alice faced an interesting challenge. How would they communicate? The telephone was too expensive. Although Alice spoke Hebrew, she was able to read and write it at only an elementary level. Rafi could write neither Czech nor German. They decided that it would be best to write to each other in Hebrew. Alice once again began studying Hebrew and became more fluent with each of the many letters that she wrote to her son.

  Rafi graduated from the conservatory four years later with a coveted first prize.

  Over the next few years Rafi would win many competitions, including the Piatigorsky Artist Award in Boston, second prize at the 1963 Munich International Cello Competition, and first prize at the 1965 competition in Santiago de Compostela. With all of the concerts that ensued, his international career was launched.

  Security came to Rafi with an offer to serve as head of the cello department at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England, where he remained for twenty-two years. He also conducted the First Chamber Orchestra at the Royal College of Music in London, where he made his home for the rest of his life, and he and his wife, Geneviève, founded an annual summer chamber music festival at Gex, in the French countryside, where they had a second home. Alice would frequently travel with Rafi as his accompanist in the late sixties and early seventies. Together they played cello-piano concerts throughout Europe and even ventured as far as the United States and South America, while he continued to be awarded prizes and honors, including the Grosser Sudetendeutscher Kulturpreis 2000 in Nuremberg, and Britain’s highest recognition of a musician by the queen mother, who made him an Honorable Member of the Royal College of Music. But the most meaningful reward may have been one that was not given to him; rather, his legacy as a teacher was honored when one of his students won second prize in the International Rostropovitch Cello Competition.

  But no matter the heights he achieved as cellist and teacher, Rafi would remain forever grateful to his own teacher, mentor, and friend Paul Tortelier. In 2000 Rafi organized a Tenth Anniversary Memorial Concert in London’s Wigmore Hall in honor of the great cellist, who had died in 1990 in the village of Villarceaux, near Paris. The memorial was to be Rafi’s last big project, as he too died only one year later. Tortelier’s idealism in music and life not only influenced Rafi’s artistry but also reinforced the foundation built on his mother’s musical as well as moral principles. Tortelier, who happened to have been born on Bach’s birthday, March 21, had shared Alice’s belief in the power of that composer. He wrote, “The art of Johann Sebastian Bach represents the highest achievement of mankind: it is sovereign … as is the idea of universal peace. We must work together against the peril of nuclear war if we want our grandchildren to be able to listen to Bach’s music.”

  When Alice learned that Rafi was engaged to be married to a young French pianist, Sylvie Ott, whom he had met at the Paris Conservatory, she was thrilled to welcome her new daughter-in-law into the family. When they produced two beautiful grandsons, David and Ariel, Alice was ecstatic. Some years after, though, Alice noticed that her son seemed generally unhappy. He and Sylvie argued bitterly about insignificant details. Although they didn’t complain or speak of their problems, Alice could not help but feel the underlying hostility and ever-increasing distance between the two. One day as they were sitting around her kitchen table in London, Alice looked them both straight in the face and said, “You are both wonderful people, but together you are unhappy. It makes no sense for you to continue this way, and besides, the atmosphere is detrimental for the children.” Rafi and Sylvie looked at each other in amazement. They could hardly believe that Alice, the grandmother of their children, would suggest separation.

  Rafi asked, “Are you saying that you think we should divorce?”

  “It seems you have little choice,” Alice replied.

  “But we can’t afford a lawyer,” Rafi protested.

  “Why do you need an attorney? You are both reasonable people. Let’s work this out right now. I will act as your lawyer.” Alice reached for pen and paper and, following their suggestions, began to draft an agreement that both could live with.

  The informal family meeting resulted in a quick, fair, and amicable divorce. To further prove her unbiased support for both her son and his wife, Alice paid the fees for processing the papers for court approval. Not only did the young couple avoid both the acrimony and the costs of opposing attorneys but Alice’s diplomacy extended into the future. Today, ten years after Raphael’s death and twenty years after the divorce, Sylvie continues to check on Alice by phone.

  When speaking of her son’s divorce, Alice says, “Why should it be so hateful, so complicated? By getting married my son and his wife had made a youthful mistake. No rabbi, priest, or judge can guarantee that a marriage can or should last forever. Their life together was becoming more and more miserable, as each wanted or needed something different from the marriage. Divorce was simply the logical solution. And it was better for their two little boys than growing up facing the example of discontented parents at home. Common sense, it was simply common sense.”

  Closing her eyes for a moment to think, Alice continues, “Now that I have lived so long to see my grandsons grown, and now that both of
Rafi’s wives are older women, I know that it was the right decision. Yes, I am proud of that. Most people say that you must never interfere in your children’s lives. But sometimes they need your help, a little push … Ja, your child is always your child.”

  Toward the end of his life Rafi wrote a small testimony describing his commitment to his art. Alice memorized his words, which she often quotes aloud: “I am not ambitious to be the best, not at all. I want to show people the great beauty of music. One of the greatest pleasures of music is to make other people listen to it; to feel, for just a moment, a tiny part of an ideal world in which everything is good, beautiful … Music is a bliss. Music brings us an island of peace.” Describing him as an adult, Alice says of her son, “He almost never used the pronoun ‘I.’ When he was grown he did not talk much, but when he did you listened. My son was not ambitious or jealous in the usual way. My son was generous with his praise of others.”

  Alice describes the night Rafi died, after playing a concert in Israel. “He played a wonderful concert, all Beethoven, that evening with his Salomon Trio. He was happy. After the concert he told his friends that he did not feel well, and they took him to a hospital.” Alice explains that he was diagnosed with an iliac aneurysm. He was given anesthesia, because the doctors had to operate to try to save his life. “He never woke up,” Alice recounts. “I am thankful that he did not suffer. He had a beautiful last day. I am thankful that his last memories were of the music. I am thankful that he did not know that he was going to die so that he did not have to be afraid.”

  Acknowledging her son’s death on November 13, 2001, just thirteen days before her ninety-eighth birthday, was the trial of her life. Her friends and family worried. How could she survive this cruelest of blows? But Alice set a formidable example of accepting what she could not change with love and dignity. She was concerned for the others—for Geneviève and her grandsons.