World's oldest Holocaust survivor dies aged 110
24 Feb 2014Alice Herz-Sommer, believed to be the world's oldest Holocaust survivor and a renowned concert pianist, died in London at the age of 110.
She was born in 1903 into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague at a time when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and endured the city's ghetto following the Gernan invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939.
In 1943, the Nazis sent her and her young son to the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp, where tens of thousands of people lost their lives. Neither her husband Leopold nor her mother Sofie survived World War II, but she and her son Raphael did. They spent two years in Theresienstadt, where nearly 35,000 prisoners perished.
Raphael Sommer was one of only a handful of children to survive the camp. Mother and son were billeted in a narrow room with 16 other inmates, but fortunately remained together. They were freed in 1945 by Red Army troops and later emigrated to Israel before settling in Britain.
Alice Herz-Sommer's life was the subject of film nominated for the best short documentary at next Sunday night's Academy Awards in Los Angeles. She counted writer Franz Kafka as a family friend when she was young and carried a devotion to music that sustained her in the camp.
She died in a hospital on Sunday morning after being admitted on Friday, according to her family. Her grandson, Ariel Sommer, said: "Alice Sommer passed away peacefully this morning with her family by her bedside. Much has been written about her, but to those of us who knew her best, she was our dear 'Gigi'. She loved us, laughed with us, and cherished music with us. She was an inspiration and our world will be significantly poorer without her by our side. We mourn her loss and ask for privacy in this very difficult moment."
Raphael Sommer, himself an accomplished cellist and conductor, died in 2001 at the age of 64.