Rafi’s funeral service was mostly music, just as his life had been. A few people spoke briefly, and then several of his friends and colleagues sat around his open grave with their cellos and played. Nearly every month Alice visits Rafi’s grave on the arm of her grandson Ariel. The simple headstone is engraved in Hebrew. Asked if she believes in prayer, Alice answers, “Yes, it helps us in a crisis when we need it most.” Still, she never indulges in self-pity. “After all, I am not the only mother who has lost her son. Maybe I draw from the strength of the great pianist Clara Schumann, who one hundred years before me lost two of her children, Felix and Julia. Music kept her going until she closed her eyes for the last time.”
Alice looks back at Rafi’s premature death and admits she is glad that he missed the sorrows and pain of old age. Looking around the room at his many photographs, she says that the pictures remind her that he is dead. “Look at that painting with his cello. It is beautiful, but it is a painting of a man who is no more.” Inserting a video into her VCR player, Alice smiles and says, “Now he lives.” She watches a performance of Rafi conducting Brundibár with the Jeunesse Musicale orchestra on an international tour. “Technology is amazing. My son is dead, but here he is alive playing beautiful music for us. Who knows, someday, maybe with technology, there will be no more death.” Alice has no memory of a single exchange of abrasive words between the two of them. With Rafi’s recording of Bohuslav Martinů’s Second Cello Sonata playing in the background, Alice, with her eyes closed, says, “The only time that my son gave me pain was when he died.”
THIRTEEN
First Flight
Alice still fondly remembers her first automobile ride with her adventurous father. He was one of the earliest in Prague to buy a car and to use it for his business. By the time Alice married, cars were still rare luxury items in Czechoslovakia; her nephew Chaim Adler recalls riding as a young boy with his uncle Leopold, Alice’s new husband. Leopold sometimes let him steer on nearby country roads when they were searching for ideal spots to pick mushrooms or picnic.
Alice’s inaugural flight was in 1959 or 1960, when she traveled on a four-engine Air France propeller plane from Tel Aviv to Paris to visit her son at the Paris Conservatory. In speaking of her first airborne adventure, Alice recalls the magic that by now has become so ordinary for many of us: the way the plane rose like a bird into the air, the way it soared smoothly, and the thrill she felt sitting among the floating clouds—even the excitement of turbulence. For Alice air travel meant the possibility of visiting corners of the earth she had known only from books. As air travel was shrinking the distances between continents, Alice hoped that the idea of all humanity belonging to one family was becoming a reality. “Maybe someday we will be smart enough to live together in peace,” she says.
Although televisions were introduced in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Alice had no opportunity to see one there. Her initial exposure to television was in 1966, when it became available in Israel. And, almost childlike, she continues to marvel at the technology that we take for granted—that she can watch people from the past as if they are alive, or see something happening in the present in China or New York as she sits in front of her set in London.
Of all Alice’s firsts, however, the first time she chose to leave her homeland for Israel was the most adventurous and, in some ways, the most courageous. The country suited Alice’s personality in spite of its challenges. With her socialist leanings, her idealism, and her rejection of material values, Israel was an ideal new home. Her independence was respected by Israeli men and women, who worked together as equals in politics and war to bring their nation into being. Religion, nationality, and cultural tolerance were built into the fabric of their democracy. As Chaim Adler remarked, “It was far easier to be a secular Jew in Israel than in New York or in any European city.” And many of the recent immigrants were European refugees like Alice.
Alice also found that the Israelis understood her. They revered their artists, great and small; they had built their country on intellect and music. In gratitude, Alice vowed that she would use all of her experience and knowledge as a musician and teacher to help expand, protect, and share the culture of her tradition with future generations.
On May 14, 1948, while Alice was still in Prague, Israel declared its independence in a dignified, moving ceremony in Tel Aviv. About two hundred invited guests gathered at 4:00 P.M. in the flower-decked Tel Aviv Art Museum on Rothschild Boulevard. A large portrait of Theodor Herzl hung behind a table with thirteen chairs arranged for members of the provisional government. The Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra, seated in the balcony, played the new national anthem, “Hatikvah” (The Hope), which was based on the same folk melody as Smetana’s “Moldau.” One by one each member of the new government signed the Proclamation of Independence, and in closing Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion rapped his gavel. “The State of Israel is established. This meeting is ended.”
In her autobiography Golda Meir wrote of being unable to stop crying throughout the ceremony. “The State of Israel!… and I, Golda Mabovitch Meyerson, had lived to see the day.” As Ben-Gurion read the words explaining the reason for the new country—“The State of Israel will be open to Jewish immigration and the ingathering of exiles”—she sobbed aloud, thinking of all the lives that could have been saved and of those who were missing from the ceremony.
Half a century earlier, six years before Alice was born, at the first Zionist Conference, in Basel, Switzerland, Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist, had noted in his diary: “At Basel, I founded the Jewish state. If I were to say this today, I would be greeted with laughter.” Confident in his belief, he wrote, “In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty, everyone will see it.” Herzl’s work for a Jewish homeland had roots in his covering the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an officer in the French military, an innocent man who was convicted of treason and sentenced to death because of French anti-Semitism. After twelve bitter years of the Nazis’ decimation of Europe’s Jews and a fight for Israel’s independence in a war against the British, Herzl’s prediction had, at last, come true, though he was not alive to witness it.
By the time Alice and Rafi arrived at the Port of Haifa, the State of Israel was celebrating its first birthday. What struck her first were the exciting contrasts of Jerusalem: the beauty of the ancient city, with its camels and donkey carts, and the sights and sounds of twentieth-century life, from restaurants and nightlife to the noxious fumes created by cars and trucks. Most meaningful were the sounds of Beethoven and Mozart floating onto the streets from the windows of schools and apartments.
Alice still remembers the first time she heard ten-year-old Daniel Barenboim, who would become a world-famous conductor, play all of Mozart’s sonatas for piano in the small concert hall of the music academy soon after he had immigrated from Argentina with his parents. Alice feels privileged to have known him as a child and beams when she talks about him: “Very unusual … absolutely genius.” She is quick to remind that, even after so many decades, Danny took the time to visit her in London early in 2002, after he learned of Rafi’s death. “He was best friends with my son. We talked about peace. He is an idealist.” Barenboim and his late friend Edward Said, the Columbia University professor and writer, founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, made up of both Israeli and Palestinian musicians as well as performers from other Arab countries. According to Barenboim, he conceived the orchestra as a project against ignorance. He said, “It is absolutely essential for people to get to know the other, to understand what the other thinks and feels, without necessarily agreeing with it.”
Barenboim in accord with Alice believes that the Palestinians and Israelis can live together, and that making music together is one path to peace. With little money for rent in the early years, Alice shared the kitchen and bathroom of her and Rafi’s apartment in Jerusalem with an Arab family. When she was working in the evenings or on weekends, they fed and watched over her son. Making friends of “enemies” h
as been one of Alice’s keenest commitments. She is hopeful for the new peace efforts. “We must find a way to stop the killing,” she says.
When Alice arrived in Israel, she was past her forty-sixth birthday and was unknown as a concert artist there. According to the critics of the day, including Max Brod, who heard her play with orchestras in Europe before the war as well as afterward in Israel, she was a great artist. She was a sensitive pianist who produced a warm, beautiful tone and performed with exquisite emotional rhythm. With her obedience to the composer’s directions, Alice’s playing was said to be reminiscent of the traditions of Dame Myra Hess and Mieczysław Horszowski. “I am a very simple person. And I play simply, without exaggeration,” she says. Still in her prime, she might have been invited to perform with the Israel Philharmonic, which would most likely have led to international recognition. In fact, several of her fellow prisoners in Theresienstadt went on to successful careers after the war. Following his appointment as conductor of the Czech Philharmonic, Karel Ančerl led the Toronto Symphony, while Karel Berman, with his rich bass voice, enjoyed a major career in Eastern Europe, performing with both the Czech Philharmonic and the Prague Opera.
But careers in music are usually forged by ambitious performers during their youth. Alice was a true artist in that she continued to practice for five or six hours a day and polish her repertoire whether or not she had a paid concert. As she says, “I worked for my inner critic. I never cared what others thought.” Chaim Adler thinks that if Alice had stayed behind the Iron Curtain in Prague, she would have continued to play with the Czech Philharmonic and probably would have been invited to tour throughout the Eastern Bloc countries. “Alice was certainly one of Czechoslovakia’s finest pianists,” her nephew says. All it would have taken for her to have been discovered and promoted by an international manager, her friends think, would have been an article or two about her past for American or British papers and successful recitals in New York and London. But Alice had no interest in exploiting tragedy for personal gain; most people who heard her play never knew that she was a refugee from a concentration camp.
Life and expectations had changed for Alice when she arrived in Israel. In solitude she could ask herself why such awful tragedy had struck not just her family but the Jewish people. And then she would marvel at the miracle of Israel and the hope it offered to the refugees. The Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke had tried to explain that wisdom does not presume—wisdom is not knowing the elusive answers but fearlessly facing the questions. “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.” He went on, “Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Alice’s embracing of the questions—her curiosity and openness to new and different experiences—is largely responsible for her inner peace and contagious, youthful happiness. Since her fearless first flights, Alice has never stopped observing, questioning, or learning from what each day brings—beyond books and degrees. That, for her, is the highest form of education.
FOURTEEN
Alice the Teacher
“I didn’t want anyone to pity me,” Alice says. “From my first day at the music academy, I kept silent about my past. I wanted no special privileges because I was a refugee. No one knew that I had survived a concentration camp. My students and their families did not need to be burdened with that part of my past.”
Alice was no ordinary piano teacher. She threw herself into her work at the Academy in Jerusalem with the same enthusiasm, tolerance, gusto, and love with which she did everything else in her life. She recalls, “It was so thrilling because I had the new challenge of teaching advanced students to play a pianist’s most difficult repertoire—not like giving lessons to beginners in Prague. I had to learn how to teach all levels of students who spoke many different languages.” Alice was known as a tough but fair taskmaster. She held everyone to the highest standard. But students have said that they learned nearly as much from her eternal smile as they did from her words. Even when the nuances of the Hebrew language confounded her, her students could easily grasp Alice’s emotional meaning.
Some students from Arab families came to her for lessons, and Alice warmly remembers one of them in particular, Killes. Now a teacher herself, Killes visited Alice in London four years ago and brought her student notebooks from fifty years earlier; she wanted to show her former teacher that she had written down every word, every instruction Alice had given during the lessons. She told Alice, “I wanted you to know that your way is the way I teach today. When I have a difficulty with a student, I review what you said. In this way, Alice, you are still my teacher.”
Alice would not let Killes leave without playing for her. Killes felt a bit flustered. Then she looked into Alice’s encouraging eyes and decided to try one of the last works she had studied with Alice before her graduation from the academy, Debussy’s translucent “L’Isle Joyeuse.” Afterward, Alice told her, “I am so proud of you.” Killes says, “Her words sent me into the clouds.”
Her former student Lea Nieman, when asked about Alice, comes back with “I can still smell those apples. She was so busy that she had no time to eat. Alice always kept apples in her bag—so fresh they still had green leaves attached—and when she was hungry she would eat one in the middle of the lesson. When she opened the door of her studio for me, the entire cozy room was scented with the odor of newly plucked fruit. After my lesson ended she would ask if I was hungry as she thrust an apple into my hand and sent me on my way. She was the kind of surrogate mother that music students love.”
“Alice is a phenomenon,” Nurit Vashkal Linder pronounces animatedly. “She was so energetic and generous. And she simply could not let you leave her studio without giving you something, a piece of music, a candy, a pencil. But more importantly, when you had difficulty learning a passage, she was remarkably patient. If Alice had a clock, it was invisible. My lesson lasted as long as necessary. When I had prepared particularly well, my lesson was longer. She was, and is, my most unforgettable teacher. I use my knowledge of music in everything I do and in everyday life.”
Nurit makes special trips to London to visit Alice. “And she still insists on giving something to me before I leave,” she says. “The last time I saw her, it happened that we had spent the entire morning together, and when the doorbell rang it was already one. It was Alice’s daily delivery from meals on wheels. I grabbed my bag to leave, but Alice insisted that I stay for lunch, and proceeded to take out two plates and two forks and began to divide the meal—a bit of some kind of meat hidden under gravy, about two tablespoons of mashed potatoes, and maybe seven string beans. Not even enough for one normal appetite. But Alice was so insistent that I poured two small glasses of water and we sat together. And then Alice took a bite, and she declared, ‘Marvelous.’ It took me a whole moment to realize that she was referring to our dining together rather than to the food.”
Nurit calls Alice every week from Israel. “I try to be helpful and Alice loves to speak Hebrew,” Nurit reports. “She was a very strict teacher, despite her patience. Her standards were immensely high. I always felt sorry to disappoint her. She tried so hard with me.”
As a teacher Alice draws her inspiration from the great composers; though they are of another, distant time, she has spent decades and continues to spend time exploring their thoughts and motivations. “My parents instilled in us a moral education by example,” she says. She likes to point to Beethoven, who in spite of having little to call his own did his best to help where help was needed. Even though Beethoven could barely pay his own hotel bill, he once organized a benefit concert at the Grand Hotel Pupp in Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia, for an unknown composer who had fallen on hard times.
Alice speaks about Beethoven constantly; she admires his genius. “As I grow older, I appreciate Beethoven’s depth more and more,” she says. He created new music dicta
ted by his fearless talent, breaking the bonds of established rules when necessary. Beethoven was the first musician to call himself an artist and to live by his work, beholden to no one. He searched for meaning in life, and he kept a notebook of philosophical quotations for inspiration. His understanding of human emotions was expressed through his timeless music. Alice likes to point out that Beethoven was free from conventional prejudice. He stood up to kings and princes when he disagreed with them, and Alice says, “He would not have been afraid to stand up to Hitler.” While Beethoven’s manners and his dress could be crude, his moral code—his unwavering stance for justice and freedom—was unimpeachable. “In the camp, I sometimes felt that I was protesting against the inhumanity of the Nazis when I played Beethoven,” she says. “I could feel the audience breathing, feeling with me as they clung to their memories of a better time.”
Alice also drew lessons, for her students and herself, from Schubert, Brahms, and Schumann, for their personal humility, respect for the talent of others, and the power of their works. When Beethoven died, Schubert, who was only thirty years old, said, “I still hope to make something of myself, but how can anyone do anything after Beethoven?”
Brahms left school when he was fifteen. Needing to earn his living, he had no opportunity to attend a university. But throughout his life he read philosophy, and, infinitely curious, he kept up with the latest scientific inventions. And he never forgot his humble beginnings or anyone who helped him along the way. Constantly Brahms reminded himself and others that the great poet Goethe had taught, “We only think we are original because we know nothing.”
Robert Schumann also lived a generous life. Rather than promote his own career, he recommended other composers’ works to publishers, and as a critic he called international attention to young, unknown musicians through lavish, though deserved, praise in his articles for Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal for Music). Schumann was responsible for discovering masterpieces of Schubert and Bach, who were largely forgotten after their deaths, and for arranging posthumous publications of their work.
A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World's Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor Page 12