At 111, Dr. Alexander Imich may be the oldest living Holocaust survivor. / YouTube As a writer for a Yiddish newspaper and as a Yiddish translator, I spend a lot of time working with Holocaust survivors and their writings. I’ve spent upwards of 1000 hours conducting oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors and translating Holocaust…
A documentary about Alice Herz-Sommer, the 110-year-old Holocaust survivor who died last weekend, has won the Academy Award for best short documentary. “The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life” is a 38-minute film about Herz-Sommer’s use of music to survive the death camps. In accepting the Oscar, the film’s director, Malcolm Clarke, said…
(Haaretz) — Alice Herz-Sommer, the Jewish pianist from London and survivor of Theresienstadt, died Sunday at the age of 110. After the passing of Sommer, whom the media described as the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor, the unofficial title passes to Yisrael Kristal, an Israeli confectioner from Haifa, who celebrated his 110th birthday last September. Yisrael…
At 110 years old, Alice Herz-Sommer died too soon. As the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor, Herz-Sommer, a noted musician, was limited in recent years in her daily existence. She lived alone in London in a tiny cocoon-like efficiency apartment. But she revered life and mused on its mystery and majesty. Where others saw a tree…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a condolence letter to Ariel Sommer, the grandson of Alice Herz-Sommer, who was the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor. Herz-Sommer died Sunday in London at the age of 110. With her death, Yisrael Kristal, an Israeli candy maker from Haifa who turned 110 in September, becomes the unofficial world’s oldest…
(JTA) — In her 110 years, Alice Herz-Sommer has been an accomplished concert pianist and teacher, a wife and mother — and a prisoner in Theresienstadt. Now she is the star of an Oscar-nominated documentary showing her indomitable optimism, cheerfulness and vitality despite all the upheavals and horrors she faced in the 20th century. “The…
Alice Herz-Sommer, the Czech pianist and Theresienstadt concentration camp survivor, celebrated her birthday on November 26th. A Londoner for three decades, Herz-Sommer had received the tribute of “Everything is a Present,” a 2009 film by the noted British documentarian Christopher Nupen who has also worked on films starring Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, and Pinchas Zukerman,…
A Century of Wisdom: Lessons From the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World’s Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor By Caroline Stoessinger Spiegel & Grau, 256 pages, $23 Let us consider the astonishing story of pianist Alice Herz-Sommer. Born in prewar (that is, pre-World War I) Prague, Herz-Sommer survived Theresienstadt, made aliyah and finally settled in London….
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