Tributes have been paid to Alice Herz-Sommer, a renowned concert pianist who was believed to have been the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor, after she died in London at the age of 110.
She was born 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 Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. She then spent two years in Theresienstadt (Terezín) concentration camp, where nearly 35,000 prisoners perished.
In an extraordinary life, which was the subject of film nominated for the best short documentary at next Sunday night’s Academy Awards, she counted Franz Kafka as a family friend when she was young and carried a devotion to music that sustained her in the camp.
Read more: The Guardian
