A Garden of Eden in Hell : The Life of Alice Herz-Sommer
by Müller, Melissa and Piechocki, Reinhard
| Item type | Current location | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode |
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Books
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Fiction | Non-fiction | 927 M685G 2008 (Browse shelf) | Available | 61665 |
Include Illustrations, Noted and Index
"Alice Herz-Sommer was born in 1903 in Prague, the Prague of the Hapsburgs and of Franz Kafka, a family friend. Her mother was an accomplished pianist and a childhood friend of Gustav Mahler. It became increasingly clear that Alice, too, was musically very gifted and at sixteen she was the youngest member of the masterclass at Prague's German Musical Academy. She soon became one of the best-known pianists in the city." "But little by little her comfortable, bourgeois world began to crumble around her. Even as a child she had suffered from anti-Semitic attacks, but as the Nazi's swept across Europe, anti-Jewish feeling not only intensified but was legitimised. Then, in 1942, Alice's mother was deported. 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." "However, a year later, she, too - together with her husband and their six-year-old son - was deported to a concentration camp. But even in Theresienstadt, even when her husband was transported to Auschwitz, music was her salvation. In the course of more than a hundred concerts she gave her fellow-prisoners strength and hope in a world of hunger, pain and death. This is her story, a story of the power of love and of music. But it is also the story of a mother's struggle to create a happy childhood for her beloved only son in the midst of atrocity and barbarism. Of 15,000 children sent to the camp, Raphael was one of the 130 who survived. Today, Alice Herz-Sommer lives in London and she still plays the piano every day."
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