One of the major difficulties of studying the Holocaust is understanding its sheer scale. The human brain isn’t built to process what the murder of millions of people really means.
However, by zeroing in and looking at individual stories, we can maybe start to understand what the Holocaust was and put faces to a small portion of the human suffering.
Although it’s important to remember the millions who died, it’s also important to remember the survivors, who had to figure out how to go on with their lives after witnessing the genocide.
Among those who endured the unimaginable horrors of the Nazi ghettos and concentration camps, who then lived to tell about it, were three remarkable pianists: Alice Herz-Sommer, Lena Stein-Schneider, and Marian Filar.
Today we’re looking at their stories and how, despite the brutal persecution and dehumanisation that they endured, these three artists found refuge in music – not just during wartime, but for the rest of their lives.
Alice Herz-Sommer
Alice Herz-Sommer in 1924
Alice Herz was born in Prague in 1903. Her father was a merchant, and her highly educated mother ran a well-respected salon. As a child, she met figures like Mahler and Freud.
She started learning piano as a child. Family friend Artur Schnabel encouraged her to become a professional musician, and she studied at the German Academy of Music in Prague.
In 1931, she married a businessman named Leopold Sommer and had a son with him. She worked as a musician until the Nazi takeover barred her from doing so.
Alice Herz-Sommer with her son
In July 1943, Hertz-Sommer and her son were deported to Theresienstadt. (Her husband ended up dying in Dachau.)
While at Theresienstadt, she played in dozens of concerts for a variety of audiences, including fellow prisoners, guards, and Red Cross inspectors. She later wrote about the experience:
We had to play because the Red Cross came three times a year. The Germans wanted to show their representatives that the situation of the Jews in Theresienstadt was good. Whenever I knew that I had a concert, I was happy. Music is magic. We performed in the council hall before an audience of 150 old, hopeless, sick and hungry people. They lived for the music. It was like food to them. If they hadn’t come [to hear us], they would have died long before. As we would have.
After Theresienstadt was liberated in 1945, she returned to Prague with her son. A few years after that, she moved to Israel. In 1986, she moved to Britain. She continued practicing the piano for three hours a day until the end of her life.
She died in 2014 at the age of 110. She ended up being the oldest living Holocaust survivor.
Here’s a trailer for the 2013 documentary on her life, The Lady In Number 6. It won “Best Documentary – Short Subject” at the Oscars the following year.
Inspirational Alice Sommer – The Lady In Number 6: Music Saved My Life
Lena Stein-Schneider
Lena Stein-Schneider
Lena Stein-Schneider was born Helene Meyerstein in 1874 in Leipzig.
Helene Meyerstein studied both piano and voice at the storied Leipzig Conservatory. In 1892, after she graduated, she married a wealthy businessman named Alfred Schneider, and they moved to Berlin. Over the next thirteen years, they had four children together.
Instead of giving up her career after marriage and motherhood, as many women did, she continued her musical studies, focusing on composition.
She crafted a work pseudonym – Lena Stern-Schneider – out of her real name. It was under this name that she would publish her compositions.
We don’t know exactly when she began composing, but we know that her first success came in 1909 with her operetta Der Luftikus (“The Wind”). She usually wrote her own librettos and conducted her own works. In 1919, she began writing movie music, and in the 1920s, she traveled to America.
Lena Stein Schneider Werbeplatte – Gut Chick Billig I Bottina Shimmy
We also know that she was very active in the Berlin salon scene. She founded and directed the Rubinstein’s Women’s Choir.
However, when the Nazis took power in 1933, everything changed. If she wanted to continue working as a musician, she had to register with the Reichsmusikkammer (Reich Chamber of Music). However, she would have been denied on account of her Jewish ancestry.
Soon after the Nazis came to power in the early 1930s, her Rubinstein choir was disbanded, and she could no longer work. In addition, she was now a widow, adding to financial pressures.
On 6 August 1942, when she was 68, she was deported to the Theresienstadt Ghetto. The papers and scores she left behind were all destroyed.
She survived the war, but by that time, she was growing elderly and her health was deteriorating. Understandably, it had been badly affected by her time in Theresienstadt.
After the war, she fought the German government for compensation for her treatment under the Nazis, but the evidence they required to prove her case had been destroyed. Ultimately she received 3500 marks: a truly paltry sum, given all she’d endured.
She continued composing a few small works after the war. She died in June 1958 in Munich at the age of eighty-four.
Marian Filar
Marian Filar in 1950s
Marian Filar was born in Warsaw in December 1917. As a toddler, he fell in love with the sound of the piano and resisted his parents’ efforts to teach him violin instead.
At six, he made his public debut at the Warsaw Conservatory. At twelve, he appeared as soloist in a Mozart concerto with the Warsaw Philharmonic.
He clearly had extraordinary promise. Unfortunately, during his teen years, the Nazis ascended to power. He was encouraged to seek training outside the country, but his family didn’t have the resources to send him away.
In 1940, as the Nazis consolidated control in Poland, he and his family were relocated to the dangerous Warsaw Ghetto, along with hundreds of thousands of others. Many died in horrific conditions; they were packed into the ghetto so tightly that there was an average of nine people per room. Gradually the ghetto was “liquidated”: i.e., residents were sent by train to various Nazi death camps.
Marian Filar at 6 years old
Eventually it was the Filar family’s turn to be shipped away. The last words his mother said to him were, “I bless you. You’ll survive this horror. You’ll become a great pianist, and I’ll be very proud of you.”
Filar’s youth, cleverness, and above all luck served him well. He was sent from camp to camp: seven in all.
He wrote later:
As much as they beat and humiliated us, I knew they could not take away my talent, my gifts, my knowledge, my love of music, what I am. To them I was only a number, a slave. They know nothing about me, which was just as well. Even without a piano I always had music in my heart, which is why I never thought of suicide, no matter how bad things got. Plus, I wouldn’t have wanted to give those SS bastards the satisfaction of thinking they had triumphed over me.
Miraculously, despite countless close calls, he survived the war. His parents and sister, however, did not.
When he moved to Prague as a refugee to make a new start, he saw a poster outside an auditorium and walked into an orchestra rehearsal. After the rehearsal was over, he pulled a gutsy move, asking conductor Rafael Kubelik if he could play for him.
Eugene Ormandy and Marian Filar
Kubelik agreed. A few days later, they met at Kubelik’s house, and Kubelik invited him to play Chopin. After not having touched the piano for five years, Filar approached the piano, sat down, and played Chopin’s E-minor piano concerto from memory.
Kubelik was astonished and deeply moved, and the two remained friendly colleagues for the rest of their careers. We even have a record of a time they teamed up to perform the F-minor Chopin concerto together.
Marian Filar Plays Chopin’s Piano Concerto No.2 in F Minor Op.21
After the war, Filar had a brief moment of doubt about his chosen career, wondering if he should go into medicine instead. However, luckily for listeners, he settled on music in the end.
In 1950, he moved to America. The rest of his career is covered in his autobiography, From Buchenwald to Carnegie Hall.
He wrote:
My life was not ended by the Nazis, although they took much of it away by murdering most of my family. My life went on. I was and am a musician, a teacher, a performer and a concert artist who has had a long international career. And that life, too, is part of my story.
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