The oldest known survivor of the Nazi Holocaust, Alice Herz-Sommer, died at 109 and minus the two years in the concentration camp in Terezin, she went on to live a fairly good life. At 109, Alice Herz-Sommer is known as the oldest known survivor of the Nazi Holocaust.
Alice Herz-Sommer was born on November 26, 1903, to Friedrich and Sofie Herz in Prague, Czechoslovakia. She died on February 23, 2014 in London, England, United Kingdom while she was in the hospital. Alice’s dad died before the Holocaust. The lowest point in her life during her two years in the concentration camp was in 1942, when her seventy-three year old mother was sent to Treblinka an extermination camp from Theresienstadt (“Alice Herz-Sommer”).
She was from a privileged secular Jewish family. Alice and her family spoke German. Alice had five siblings and they were all highly educated. Alice’s father was a very well-known merchant and her mother was highly educated and somewhat a well-known musician and composer. When Herz-Sommer was just sixteen she was the youngest student at the German Music Academy. There were a lot of times that Alice was the featured piano soloist with the Czech Philharmonic. Alice really enjoyed her extremely successful career as a pianist (Frantz). When Alice was a young girl she became great friends with Franz Kafka and Gustav Mahler. Franz Kafka was a highly influenced German author. Gustav Mahler was a leading conductor and composer (Fox). They were good friends with her mother.
She started playing the piano at around the age of five. She had learned how to play piano from her older sisters. By her late twenties, Alice was well-known through Central Europe for playing the piano (“109 Year Old Alice Herz-Sommer”).
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- Langer, Emily. "Alice Herz-Sommer, Concert Pianist and Holocaust Survivor, Dies at 110." Washington Post. The Washington Post, 27 Feb. 2014. Web. 06 Apr. 2014. .
- Today I’m Inspired by: Alice Herz-Sommer
"Today I’m Inspired By: Alice Herz-Sommer." Joya Martin. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Feb. 2014. .
- "109 Year Old Alice Herz Sommer – the World's Oldest Pianist and Holocaust Survivor." 109 Year Old Alice Herz Sommer the Worlds Oldest Pianist and Holocaust Survivor. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Apr. 2014. .
In researching testimony, I chose to write about Eva Kor’s experience during the Holocaust. Eva and her family were taken to Auschwitz II- Birkenau from a Ceheiu which was a Romania ghetto in the 1940’s. Eva’s story starts out in Port, Romania where she was born and raised with her family before the Holocaust. Eva’s family consisted of her twin sister Miriam,two older sisters Aliz and Edit, and her parents Alexander and Jaffa. The last time Eva saw her father and sisters were when they arrived in Auschwitz after exiting the train. Eva and Miriam were with their mother until a man asked if they were twins.Their mother said yes, after asking if that was a good thing and then they were taken away never to see her again. Once taken away, they were brought to a barrack for twins where they were kept for Mengele to conduct experimentations.
There was a vocal recital on October 19th, 2017 at 7:30PM, held at the performance hall in Mountain view college. Alex Longnecker, a tenor vocalist and Imre Patkai, (pianist) played a series of homophonic textured songs, some being sung in German and others in English. The Three selected songs I will be writing about are, The Lincolnshire Poacher, The Plough Boy, and Im Wunderschonen Monat Mai. This performance played a total of 24 Pieces, composed by 4 composers, being Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ernest Chausson, Benjamin Britten, and Robert Schumann.
In researching testimony, I chose to write about Eva Kor’s. Eva and her sister Miriam were taken to Auschwitz II- Birkenau from Ceheiu, a Romanian ghetto, in the 1940’s. Eva’s story starts out in Port, Romania, where she was born and raised with her family before the Holocaust. Eva had two older sisters, Aliz and Edit, who were murdered during the Holocaust along with her parents. The last time Eva saw her father and sisters was when they arrived in Auschwitz.
Gerda Weissmann Klein’s personal account of her experiences during Germany’s invasion of Poland and of the Holocaust illustrated some of the struggles of young Jewish women at the time in their endeavors to survive. Weissmann Klein’s recount of her experiences began on September 3, 1939, at her home in the town of Bielitz, Poland, just after Nazi troops began to arrive and immediately enforce their policies on Polish Jews. On that night, which had only been the beginning for her and her family, Jews within Nazi Germany had already felt the effects of Adolf Hitler’s nationalist ideals for almost five years. From 1933 until 1939, when Weissmann Klein’s experiences began, “anti-Semitism was a recurring theme in Nazism and resulted in a wave of
Clara Schumann was a concert pianist born to Frederick Wieck and Marianne Tromlitz in Leipzig, Germany on September 13, 1819 (Comminfo). Clara was the second of five children and the daughter of a prominent music teacher and piano proprietor (Friedrich Wieck) and an opera soprano singer (Marianne Tromlitz). She died in 1896, renowned as a classical pianist and composer in the nineteenth-century Romantic style. During her height of popularity, the press deemed Clara as the “Queen of the Piano” (Schumann, Clara [Josehpine], The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music).
When in America, Helen found that it was hard not to talk about past and the stories of her imprisonment. “Some survivors found it impossible to talk about their pasts. By staying silent, they hoped to bury the horrible nightmares of the last few years. They wanted to spare their children and those who knew little about the holocaust from listening to their terrible stories.” In the efforts to save people from having to hear about the gruesome past, the survivors also lacked the resources to mentally recovery from the tragedy.
My survivor is Arek Hersh who was born in Poland. In September, 1939 the Nazi army attacked Poland. He and his family had to move to Lodz with relatives.While at Lodz the nazi army tried to take Arek’s dad to a work camp but he escaped with Arek’s brother. So they took Arek instead and at the railroad station, where he was going to be transported, his brother tried to take his place but Arek refused.He was taken to otoschno camp. After 18 months, he and 10 others have survived from the 2500 other men that were transported with him. He worked by cleaning the camp commander’s office and he stole food in order to stay alive. In 1942, he was sent home and that same year the Nazi decided to liquidate the ghetto where Arek was living. Arek and 4000
Those of half and quarter Jewish descent remain largely forgotten in the history of the Third Reich and genocide of the Holocaust. Known as Mischlinge, persons of deemed “mixed blood” or “hybrid” status faced extensive persecution and alienation within German society and found themselves in the crosshairs of a rampant National Socialist racial ideology. Controversially, these people proved somewhat difficult to define under Nazi law that sought to cleave the Volk from the primarily Jewish “other”, and as the mechanization toward Hitler’s “Final Solution” the Mischlinge faced probable annihilation. The somewhat neglected status of Mischlinge necessitates a refocusing on German racialization as well as reconsideration of the implications wrought by the alienation and ultimate persecution of the thousands of half and quarter Jews subjugated in Nazi Germany.
She played a concert in 1883 at the Music Hall in Boston at the age of 16. According to the article, “Synesthesia and Feminism: a Case Study on Amy Beach (1867-1944), author Jeremy Logan (2015) talks about Amy’s success as a young composer and states “Amy Marcy Cheney debuted as a professional concert pianist in Boston on 21 October 1883, playing Ignaz Moscheles’ G minor Concerto and Chopins Rondo in E. Adolf Neuendorff (1843-1897) conducted her debut performance” (p. 131). She shocked the crowd with her talent and was praised highly for being talented with the piano. Then her career grew from there. She then joined the Boston Symphony Orchestra. According to the book New Historical Anthology of Music by Women, author James R. Briscoe (2004) discusses Amy’s performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and says “In 1885, a momentous year for her, Amy Cheney played for the first time with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, began a lifetime association with the music publisher, Author P. Schmidt” (p. 198). She performed Chopin’s F minor Concerto at the first concert she conducted with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She continued to play with them for several shows until she married Henry Harris Aubrey Beach in 1885. He did not particularly like Amy performing concerts and asked her to stop performing concerts. He only allowed her to perform for charity events. He didn’t believe that Amy had to keep
The brilliant composer Clara Schumann was born as Clara Josephine Wieck on 13 September 1819. Even before her birth, her destiny was to become a famous musician. Her father, Friedrich Wieck, was a piano teacher and music dealer, while her mother, Marianne Wieck, was a soprano and a concert pianist and her family was very musically gifted. Her father, Friedrich, wanted to prove to the world that his teaching methods could produce a famous pianist, so he decided, before Clara’s birth, that she would become that pianist. Clara’s father’s wish came true, as his daughter ended up becoming a child prodigy and one of the most famous female composers of her time.
On May 8th, 1745 Maria Antonia Luneborn and Jan Václav Antonín Stamic (Germanized as Johann Wenzel Anton Stamitz) welcomed their son, Karl Phillip Stamitz into the world. Although born in Mannheim, a city in Southwestern Germany, Stamitz’s family came from what is now known as Maribor, Slovenia with Czech ancestry roots. He was the oldest of Maria and Johann’s five children; his brother Anton Thadäus Nepomuk, his sister Maria Franziska, and two other siblings who didn’t survive infancy. As the son of one of the greatest baroque and classical violinists of all time, Karl was born into a prodigal family of musicians and would live on to continue the legacy. Karl’s father Johann left his alma mater, the University of Prague, to begin his career as a violinist at the age of eighteen.
“My mind was so dull, my nerves so worn from waiting, that only an emotionless vacuum remained” (213). Gerda Weissman Klein was one of the few fortunate Jews to survive the Holocaust and tell her story. She explains her tragic story through her own her memoir called “All But My Life”. Gerda made it through the Holocaust because of her loving family, loyal friends, and intuition of her own.
The children during the holocaust had many struggles with their physical health. They were forced to stay in very small places and were unable to have contact with a doctor if they had gotten sick. Also they had a lack of food and some children in their host homes would get abused and mistreated. At least a little over one million children were murdered during the holocaust (“Children’s diaries”). Out of all the Jewish children who had suffered because of the Nazis and their axis partners, only a small number of surviving children actually had wrote diaries and journals (“Children’s diaries”). Miriam Wattenberg is one out of the hundreds of children who wrote about their life story during the time of the holocaust (“Children’s Diaries”). She was born October 10, 1924 (“Children’s Diaries”). Miriam started writing her diary in October 1939, after Poland surrendered to the German forces (“Children’s Diaries”). The Wattenberg family fled to Warsaw in November 1940 (“Children’s Diaries”). At that time she was with her parents and younger sister (“Children’s Diaries”). They all had to live in the Warsaw ghetto (“Children’s Diaries”). Halina, another child survivor, tells what happened to her while in hiding. Halina and her family went into hiding ...
At the age of three, Wolfgang showed signs of remarkable musical talent. He learned to play the harpsichord, a keyboard instrument related to the piano, at the age of four. Wolfgang began composing minuets at the age of five. When he was only six years old, he and his older sister, Anna Maria, embarked on a series of concert tours to Europe’s courts and major cities. They played for the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa at her court in Vienna in 1762. Both children played the keyboard, but Wolfgang became a violin virtuoso as well. Before he was fourteen, Mozart had composed many works called sonatas for the harpsichord, piano, or the violin as well as orchestral and other works. His father recognized Wolfgang’s amazing talent and devoted a lot of his time to his son’s general and musical education.
...ing that included a vast array of famous musicians, such as the likes of Von Bulow, William Mason, Carl Tausig, Rafael Joseffy, and, later, Arthur Friedheim, Alexander Siloti, Eugene d'Albert, and Moritz Rosenthal. He not only was a great piano player but a superb teacher as well. Many people do not have the patience, nor ability to become a teacher. Not many are able to, but the select few are very under-valued, and should be given more of the respect that they deserve.