The Nazis took her family, but they couldn’t take her music, they couldn’t break her spirit, and she outlived them all. Alice Sommer has died at age 110, but not without leaving us this beautiful message.
Alice Herz-Sommer, who is said to have counted writer Franz Kafka among her family friends and is the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary, was a Jewish pianist and musician from Prague in what is today the Czech Republic. In 1943, the Nazis sent her and her young son to Theresienstadt concentration camp, where tens of thousands of people lost their lives. Neither her husband Leopold nor her mother Sofie survived WWII, but she and her son did.