Title: A Garden of Eden in Hell: The Life of Alice Herz-Sommer
Author: Melissa Muller, Reinhard Piechocki
Hardcover, 456 Pages, Published 2007
This is a biography of Alice Herz-Sommer, an acclaimed pianist and the oldest holocaust survivor. Alice was born on November 26, 1903 in Prague, the Prague of the Hapsburgs and of Franz Kafka - Kafka was her family friend who came to her family’s Passover seder. Anyway, as she was musically very gifted, even by her mid-teens, she was one of the best-known pianists in Prague.
Yet, as the Nazis swept across Europe, her comfortable, bourgeois world began to crumble around her, as anti-Jewish feeling not only intensified but was legitimized. As a result, Alice’s mother was deported in 1942. Desperately unhappy, she resolved to learn Chopin’s 24 Etudes — the most technically demanding piano pieces she knew — and the complex but beautiful music saved her sanity.
Reaching Theresienstadt
A year later, she, too — together with her husband Leopold and their six-year-old son Stephan — was deported to a concentration camp called Theresienstadt. But even there, music was her salvation. She performed more than 100 concerts entirely from memory during the almost two years she was at Theresienstadt, and rotated through several programs that included challenging pieces by Beethoven, Schumann, and Smetana.
Thus, she gave her fellow-prisoners hope in a world of pain and death. So this is her remarkable story. Not only is it her story of survival, but also a story of a mother’s struggle to create a happy childhood for her beloved only son in the midst of atrocity and barbarism. Alice’s son was Stephan Raphael who was one of the 130 children survived out of 15,000 sent to the camp.
Music makes us humans rich
The forward of the book was written by Alice herself, and it is very moving and insightful because it was her own words. Following is how she begins it:
“Life gave me the talent to play the piano and to inspire happiness in people through music; and I am just as grateful that it gave me a love of music. Music makes us humans rich. It is the revelation of the divine. It takes us to paradise.
“Since my childhood music has been my real home. It provided me with security when I had to confront my first inner torments and through it I found support, when death robbed me of my loved ones. Its meditative power provided me with the determination to cope first with the fascist and then the communist dictatorships that declared me and others like me subhuman.
“When, in the early summer of 1942, my seventy-two-year-old mother was issued with a deportation order and I had to go with her to the assembly point and say goodbye to her for the last time, I was out of my mind. How was it possible to tear an old lady away from her world with nothing more than a rucksack on her back and send her to a concentration camp? Even to this day I can clearly hear the inner voice that spoke to me: ‘Practice the Chopin Études, they will save you.’”
As above said, Alice was born on November 26, 1903, and died on February 23, 2014, so this is the story of the oldest holocaust survivor who was 110 when expired.
The hallmark of the book is its straightforward narration and chronological biography of Herz-Sommer’s amazing life. It perfectly describes what she created, along with the other Jewish musicians who were imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. And the book is full of anecdotes on how they produced operas, choir performances, orchestras and chamber concerts.
It also recounts all on the most ramshackle of instruments, often from scores reproduced from memory, and especially how they refused to give up their humanity in the face of the great inhumanity that surrounded them.
Life saving journey
Alice loved music from a young age and showed great promise as a pianist, performing with the Czech Philharmonic at the age of 20 and winning numerous competitions and accolades. Music pervaded every part of her body and soul, and she loved it deeply. Once, her piano teacher suggested that she didn’t need to practice for four hours every day because “an hour or two would be quite enough to make progress with your talent.” At the time she replied to it: “But it gives me so much pleasure…There is nothing lovelier than learning a new piece.”
Below is how she describes in the forward the role music played in her life in the concentration camp:
“Music gave heart to many of the prisoners, if only temporarily. In retrospect I am certain that it was music that strengthened my innate optimism and saved my life and that of my son. It was our food; and it protected us from hate and literally nourished our souls. There in the darkest corners of the world it removed our fears and reminded us of the beauty around us.
“Music supported me as I turned my back on my home of Prague for the last time and had to think of learning new languages, and I am thankful for it too, at my great age, when I spend many hours alone. It hardly matters where I am; I am not prone to loneliness. Although I no longer travel anymore, through music I can see the world.”
Later publications
Though the original title of the book is “A Garden of Eden in the Hell” (original German title was as “Ein Garten Eden immitten der Holle”), it was changed in later publications. So it became “Alice’s Piano: The Life of Alice Herz-Sommer”. This latter book first released in Germany in 2006, and then published its English translation in England in 2007. But the authors are same: Melissa Muller and Reinhard Piechocki. Muller is a journalist, and Piechocki is a friend of Herz-Sommer for many years. This book also includes the original foreword by Alice Herz-Sommer, and exclusively adds with a brief note from her son, who died in 2001.
It is also important to note that after this publication, another book came out on Alice’s life called “A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World’s Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor”. It was published by Spiegel & Grau/Random House, and written by Caroline Stoessinger, a pianist and musical director. There she captures Alice’s moral strength, sense of humor, modesty, independence, curiosity about people and abounding love.
One of best of books
However, if you are a holocaust reader, this is a must read book. Not only, could we gather new experiences of Alice from it, but also enjoy the literature in it. Of course, the book embodies the protagonist’s harsh experiences in concentration camps, and other heartrending incidents, but in spite of that, they do not harm the literary value of the book.
And the life story of Alice Herz-Sommer is itself incredible, so reading it is always enjoyable. Definitely, it is an incredible journey as she ended her life becoming an accomplished concert pianist, a professor of music, a wife and a mother, apart from being a holocaust survivor. So “A Garden of Eden in Hell: The Life of Alice Herz-Sommer” is one of the best of books in holocaust literature.