World’s Oldest Holocaust Survivor Dies At Age 110, Film About Life Nominated For AA

Alice Herz-Sommer, the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor dies at age 110 in a hospital Sunday morning. Herz-Sommer was a talented pianist who lived in London and was originally from Prague. She survived two terrible years in the Nazi camp in Terezin, or Theresienstadt, in Germany during the Second World War.

Her grandson, Ariel Sommer, said tonight: ‘Alice Sommer passed away peacefully this morning with her family by her bedside. During her imprisonment, Ariel Herz-Sommer was sustained only by her piano and devotion to her son, Stephan.

In 1943, Alice, her husband and her son were sent from Prague to a concentration camp in the Czech city of Terezin — or, Theresienstadt in German — where inmates were allowed to stage concerts. Because of her talents, she frequently starred in these plays, which filled her head with memories in the camp where she said she was “always laughing.”

An estimated 140,000 Jews were sent to Terezin during its commission, and terribly 33,430 died there. Roughly, 88,000 were moved on to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps, where most of them were brutally killed. However, Ms Herz-Sommer and her son, Stephan, were among the lucky fewer than 20,000 who were freed when the wretched camp was liberated by the Soviet army in May of 1945.

“We all came to believe that she would just never die,’ said Frederic Bohbot, producer of the documentary “The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life.” “There was no question in my mind: ‘would she ever see the Oscars?”

A film about her life — view below — is nominated for an Academy Award.

Ms Herz-Sommer was born on November 26, 1903, in Prague, and started learning the piano from her sister at age 5.

life inspired two books: ‘A Garden of Eden in Hell’ (2006) by Melissa Mueller and Reinhard Piechocki, and ‘A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World’s Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor’ (2012) by Caroline Stoessinger.

In 1949, she left Czechoslovakia to reunite her twin sister Mizzi in Jerusalem, then taught at the Jerusalem Conservatory until 1986, after moving to London where she lived until her recent death.

Her son, Stephen, who changed his first name to Raphael after the war, made a career as a concert cellist. He died in 2001.