On Holocaust Remembrance Day we recall the story of all the musicians who survived the horror of the Holocaust through music, such as Alice Herz-Sommer.
Terezín (Theresienstadt in German) was a concentration camp located in what was then Czechoslovakia, created by Hitler and the Nazi executioners as a "model camp" to deceive the world about the conditions inside the camps and ghettos. Initially it was intended to house elderly Jews who were to be left to die of "natural causes", but over time many artists, musicians, composers of European renown and well-known intellectuals were interned there — people who were difficult to make disappear precisely because they were known at an international level.
I have experienced that the power of music is so great that it can carry into its realm any human being who possesses a heart and an open mind, making it possible to endure the most terrible hours of one's existence.
Karel Ancérl, conductor and survivor of Terezín
Despite the living conditions being no better than in most other camps, and Terezín effectively being a transit camp on the road to Auschwitz, cultural life there was very rich. Music and art in general, initially considered clandestine by the Reich and persecuted by the SS, were soon authorised at Theresienstadt, only to become an instrument of the horror's propaganda: the Nazis realised that, through music, they could deceive the entire world about what was really happening in the camps and control the Jews themselves, right up until the moment of the gas chambers.
But whereas for the SS music was merely an instrument of repression, for the interned Jews it was the only way to escape death or, at the very least, to spend their final days with dignity, doing what most elevates the human being: playing. Music thus became a powerful "instrument of resistance", and within the camp various ballets and operas were performed, some spontaneously (The Bartered Bride, Le nozze di Figaro, Carmen and even the Requiem by Giuseppe Verdi), while the band The Ghetto Swingers played jazz music.
A powerful testament to the force that music had within Terezín comes from the story of Alice Herz-Sommer, told in the documentary The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life. The film won the award for best documentary short at the 2014 Oscars ceremony, and it is Herz-Sommer herself — before dying at the age of 110 — who recounts her own story with remarkable clarity.
A highly talented Jewish pianist, her career was abruptly cut short in Prague in 1939 when she was deported along with her son to Theresienstadt, following the regime's racial laws. There she managed to escape the gas chambers thanks to her talent as a pianist. In 1949 she emigrated to Israel, where she worked as a music teacher in Jerusalem, and in 1986 she moved to London.
She played the piano for two and a half hours every morning until the age of 107. Music, then, kept her alive throughout, even after the end of the war.
What made me survive? My character. My optimism and my discipline. Punctually, every day at ten o'clock, I sit down at the piano. Everything is in order around me.
Alice Herz-Sommer