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Alice Sommer at her piano in her Belsize Park home. Her ability probably saved her life.
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Alice, 103, made a heaven in hell
Pianist recalls visits by ladies’ man franz kafka
THERE was something special about the tall and attractive young writer who regularly visited her parents’ house. Alice Sommer, who was a child turning into a teenager, would look forward to his appearances on Sundays where he would take her for nature walks and tell her stories – stories which, she recalls, were completely absorbing.
The man was Franz Kafka.
Alice, now 103, has lived a remarkable life: and age has not diminished her senses. She still lives in a flat in Belsize Park and plays her piano for three hours a day.
A renowned pianist who earned a living playing concerts, she was thrown in a concentration camp by the Nazis during the war, and only survived because of her remarkable talent for playing.
Her life story has been finally told in German, and is due to be translated into English in the summer. She has helped Kafka scholars with their works, giving interviews about the man behind the literature.
And knowing Kafka was just one of many incredible links Alice has with crucial events and people in Central Europe of the 20th century.
Kafka was friends with Max Brod, who married Alice’s sister.
They became regular visitors to the Sommer household, along with others like Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler. Alice’s parents were part of an intelligentsia in Prague.
Born in 1903, Prague was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the cultural centre of a country made up of 12 million Czechs, two million German speakers and 100,000 Jews. Her family were musicians and they would regularly have recitals in their home, which Kafka would attend.
She has now been playing the piano for a remarkable 100 years – she had her first lesson when she was just three years old.
Alice recalls: “Franz used to take me for walks in the countryside – he took us to the beautiful places surrounding Prague.”
She remembers the writer having an aura about him.
She said: “Where ever we went, even though he wasn’t particularly well known then, people were interested in Kafka. He was a very good looking man tall and his father was broad and strong.”
“He was a lovely man and very interesting, he would tell us wonderful stories.”
This popularity did have its downside.
“He was always surrounded by beautiful women, because he was such an attractive man, and it sometime made life hard for him as he could never decide which woman he liked more, he had so many choices,” she says.
But there was a serious side to the author.
“For him, life every day was a fight, a battle of ideas. He was always busy trying to determine the big questions in life: should the answer be yes or no.
“He was a man who spent his time always wondering why? Why are we here? What should be our aims in life?”
And after World War One, when Prague was rapidly filling with Jewish refugees, religion became a new problem for Kafka to tackle – did he believe in God, or was he more aware of his socio-cultural Jewish background?
Alice continues: “His father was not religious but his mum was. After the war, a lot of Orthodox Jews came to Prague: I was walking with Kafka and he was pointing them out and noticing them and wondering about them.
“I can hear his voice: he was saying, I should be with them. He was aware of his Jewish background but it also created a philosophical conflict for him.”
And before Kafka died, Alice’s brother-in-law was asked by the writer to destroy all his works: to burn all of his writings and to promise not to publish anything he had written. He chose to ignore this dying wish, and save many works that have since become part of the Kafka canon.
Alice married violinist Leopold Sommer in 1931 and had a son Raphael in 1937. She was a renowned pianist by then, but as the grip of anti-Semitism got tighter through the 1930s, Alice was not banned from playing in public.
Alice’s sister Irma escaped to Palestine in 1939 – they had managed to find enough money to buy visas and tickets, but Alice chose to stay behind as they could not raise the funds to get her mother out.
In 1942, her mother, aged 72, was taken away; a year later, she would follow with her son and husband to the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
She remembers the exact moment her mother was taken from her, knowing she would never see her again, and the moment she was told she too was going to be sent from the Prague ghetto Czechoslovakian Jews had been forced into a concentration camp.
“A voice inside me said: ‘Now only you can help yourself. At this moment I knew I had to play the 24 Etuden of Frederic Chopin.
“This is the largest requirement of any pianist, like Goethe’s Faust, or Shakespeare’s Hamlet – wonderful compositions. I ran home and practised for hours and hours, right up to when we were deported.
“Czech friends came the night before we were deported to say goodbye, and a Nazi called Herman who lived above us said: I hope you return alive. I listened to you for hours I admire you and their perseverance and this wonderful music – I have to thank you.”
In the camp, her music not only saved her life, but for many of the victims of the Nazis, however bleak life was in camp, her music reminded of a better time.
She recalls: “Camps were encouraged to have some form of a cultural life – three times a year the Red Cross would come and the Germans wanted to say what a wonderful life it was for all of us in the camps, so they made us do concerts to prove it.”
Alice ended up playing at 100 concerts, while her son, Raphael, who had already shown musical talent, performed as a singer in over 50 operas.
Alice believes her musical ability helped keep her sane in such terrible conditions. She played her music from heart and tried to keep alive a flame of humanity for her fellow prisoners, trying to keep alive what she calls a ‘little piece of heaven in that hell’, waiting to be liberated as the war turned against the Germans.
After the war she moved to Israel to establish a music academy with her son, who had become a professional cellist and conductor, and then came to London.
She remembers how hard it was to protect her son from the horrors of what he had seen in his youth.
She said: “How do you explain to a five-year-old what a Jew is, what is Hitler, what is war?
“I managed to bring up my child without Hitler. When I got to Israel, I said I would never mention Hitler again – the worst thing is to be hateful. Hatred breeds hatred. We are all the same.”
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