Alice Herz-Sommer.
The oldest-known survivor of the Holocaust died in London this week. She was 110.
“Alice Herz-Sommer, believed to be the oldest-known survivor of the Holocaust, died Sunday morning in London at age 110, a family member said,” the Associated Press reported. “Herz-Sommer’s devotion to the piano and to her son sustained her through two years in a Nazi prison camp, and a film about her has been nominated for best short documentary at next week’s Academy Awards. She died in a hospital Sunday morning after being admitted Friday, daughter-in-law Genevieve Sommer said.”
“We all came to believe that she would just never die,” said Frederic Bohbot, producer of the documentary “The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life.” ”There was no question in my mind, ‘would she ever see the Oscars.'”
“An estimated 140,000 Jews were sent to Terezin and 33,430 died there,” the article noted. “About 88,000 were moved on to Auschwitz and other death camps, where most of them were killed. Herz-Sommer and her son, Stephan, were among fewer than 20,000 who were freed when the notorious camp was liberated by the Soviet army in May 1945. Yet she remembered herself as ‘always laughing’ during her time in Terezin, where the joy of making music kept them going.”
“These concerts, the people are sitting there, old people, desolated and ill, and they came to the concerts and this music was for them our food. Music was our food. Through making music we were kept alive,” she once recalled.
Please pray for her friends and family.
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