A Garden of Eden in Hell: The Life of Alice Herz-Sommer

I was intrigued to find that Melissa Muller is the famed writer of Traudl Junge's story of her time in the bunker with Hitler, later made into the film 'Downfall'. She is fortunate to have been given such great material and this biography is also full of interesting snippets. To me though the book is not that well written, the prose is too, too plain whereas it could have had the makings of a great book in the right hands.

Alice Hertz was born in Prague in 1903 and is still allive and well, living independantly in London, practising the piano every day and enjoying her life to the full with friends and family. She is a truly remarkable woman who even now at 104 has a fun and positive outlook on life, which is clearly how she has survived so much sadness, hardship and events that have killed many many less stoical people.

From the start her enthusiasm and zest for life knew no bounds and she decided to become a musician, playing for hours and achieving her ambitions by becoming a much feted pianist in concerts and on radio.

Born of non religeous German jews, Alice had a middle class though in no way privelidged childhood, her father had a scales factory and she worked hard to achieve her goals. This was all thwarted though with the Nazi occupation and her transport to the ghetto along with her husband and 6 year old son. Some of the writing here evokes the sheer terror they must have faced, for example on the morning of their departure the caretaker walks into their appartment followed by other neighbours and they start to take their things - this is at 4.00 am. Leopold her husband says 'They already think we are dead'. Alice and her son's survival were all down to her resourcefulness in the face of the Nazis and it is truly amazing. They were amongst a small number who returned but were faced with derision by their fellow Czechs. Overheard on a train 'So many of them came back, there must have been too many holes in the gas chambers'. This was enough to force Alice to flee to Israel, which was no picnic either, having to learn Hebrew and support her son, who later became a professional Cellist.

For me the highlights of the book are the photos, many of which tell moving stories. The tin spoon -the only item left of her husband after he was sent to Dachau, the photo of Stephan aged 6 standing under the sign at the park saying 'Jews forbidden'.

Another wonderful page is the one written by her late son praising his mother for making his childhood so happy.

A fantastic story by an amazing woman but as another reviewer says 'Could have been better'.

Could have been better (1/3 people found this helpful)

Alice Herz Sommer is undoubtedly a very remarkable woman but I felt the narrative was not involving enough: it does not in any way recreate the feelings or atmosphere of the extraordinary events narrated. It reads too much as if it were ghost-written, which in fact it wasn't but the authors were too dependent on Alice's help, which may explain why the story does not make the impact it should.

Survival with the help of music (5/6 people found this helpful)

Music could always transport Alice Sommer into an autonomous paradisical world. This helped her when the real world turned hellish under the Nazis; and the central part of the book is about those years.

She was born in 1903 into a Jewish, acculturated and German-speaking family in Prague. She started playing the piano at a very young age, and at 21, made her debut as soloist with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1931 she married Leopold Sommer and their son Stephan (later to be called Raphael) was born in 1937.

With the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 their lives changed swiftly, with humiliating restrictions being imposed on Jews day after day. And then the deportations began. First, in July 1942 her 72-year old mother was deported from her Old Age Home to Theresienstadt (and from there to the Treblinka death camp). Then a year later, in July 1943, it was the turn of Alice, Leopold and Stephan, then aged six, to be sent to Theresienstadt.

The physical conditions there were grim, but a few months before the Sommers arrived, the SS had decided to turn it into a `show camp' for observers from the International Red Cross - and so the deportees were provided with musical instruments (which had been confiscated from Jews) and were allowed to arrange their own entertainment. Alice gave many recitals, and the descriptions of these are very moving. Stephan, who was musically even more precocious than his mother had been at that age, was quickly roped in to rehearse and perform in Brundibar, the opera specially composed for the children in the camp.

As defeat for Germany drew nearer in the autumn of 1944, the SS, possibly fearing an uprising of the able-bodied men in Theresienstadt, decided to send them to the extermination camps. Alice's husband was among these: she never saw him again. She learnt later that he had survived the death-march from Auschwitz to Dachau - only to die there of typhus.

But Himmler still wanted to preserve Theresienstadt as a `model' camp and to produce it in his defence at the end of the war. Alice had to work an eight hour day in barracks where slates were broken up to make insulating materials, work which was particularly hard on her hands; but in the evening she would often perform in the concerts that continued to be staged.

In May 1945 Theresienstadt was liberated and in mid-June Alice and Stephan were able to return to Prague and to continue their music al lives there.

But after the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, it again became dangerous to speak freely. In March 1949 Alice decided to move with her son to Israel, where she was to live for the next 37 years. There her musical career as performer and teacher continued, while Raphael in due course became a cellist of world stature. After his marriage in 1966, he and his wife were based in London, and there Alice joined him in 1986.

The book ends with the saddest thing that can afflict a loving mother: in 2001 Raphael Sommer died of a heart attack while on a concert tour in Israel. Alice was then 98, and coped with this grief as she had coped with so many other crises in her life, drawing some comfort from music (she still plays the piano in her Hampstead home for three hours every day). Never did she give way to bitterness; she always remained life-affirming; her philosophy eschewed hatred, whether for Germans or for Arabs. Her 100th birthday drew tributes from people from many lands. This moving book is one of them.

Melissa Muller, Reinhard Piechocki

Reader Reviews:

An inspirational story of determination, love and tolerance (2/2 people found this helpful)

Could have been better (1/3 people found this helpful)

Survival with the help of music (5/6 people found this helpful)

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