Skip to content

Where different views on Israel and Judaism are welcome.

  • Home
  • Subscribe / donate
  • Events calendar
  • News
    • Local
    • National
    • Israel
    • World
    • עניין בחדשות
      A roundup of news in Canada and further afield, in Hebrew.
  • Opinion
    • From the JI
    • Op-Ed
  • Arts & Culture
    • Performing Arts
    • Music
    • Books
    • Visual Arts
    • TV & Film
  • Life
    • Celebrating the Holidays
    • Travel
    • The Daily Snooze
      Cartoons by Jacob Samuel
    • Mystery Photo
      Help the JI and JMABC fill in the gaps in our archives.
  • Community Links
    • Organizations, Etc.
    • Other News Sources & Blogs
    • Business Directory
  • FAQ
  • JI Chai Celebration
  • [email protected]! video

Search

Archives

"The Basketball Game" is a graphic novel adaptation of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada animated short of the same name – intended for audiences aged 12 years and up. It's a poignant tale of the power of community as a means to rise above hatred and bigotry. In the end, as is recognized by the kids playing the basketball game, we're all in this together.

Recent Posts

  • New housing partnership
  • Complexities of Berlin
  • Obligation to criticize
  • Negev Dinner returns
  • Women deserve to be seen
  • Peace is breaking out
  • Summit covers tough issues
  • Jews in trench coats
  • Lives shaped by war
  • The Moaning Yoni returns
  • Caring in times of need
  • Students are learning to cook
  • Many first-time experiences
  • Community milestones … Gordon, Segal, Roadburg foundations & West
  • מקטאר לוונקובר
  • Reading expands experience
  • Controversy welcome
  • Democracy in danger
  • Resilience amid disruptions
  • Local heads CAPE crusaders
  • Engaging in guided autobiography
  • Recollecting Auschwitz
  • Local Houdini connection
  • National library opens soon
  • Regards from Israel …
  • Reluctant kids loved camp
  • An open letter to Camp BB
  • Strong connection to Israel
  • Why we need summer camp
  • Campers share their thoughts
  • Community tree of life
  • Building bridges to inclusion
  • A first step to solutions?
  • Sacre premières here
  • Opening gates of kabbalah
  • Ukraine’s complex past

Recent Tweets

Tweets by @JewishIndie

Alice Herz-Sommer – an extraordinary life

0 Flares 0 Flares ×

Alice Herz-Sommer, the oldest known survivor of the Holocaust, died Sunday at the age of 110. Herz-Sommer, her husband and their young son were taken from their native Prague to Theresienstadt in 1943. Theresienstadt, which was used by the Nazis in propaganda as a “model” Jewish community, was in fact little better than any other concentration camp. While most of those who passed through Theresienstadt would ultimately perish at Auschwitz or Treblinka, death rates at Theresienstadt were also high. Nevertheless, when, late in the war, the Nazis allowed representatives of the Red Cross to enter the camp, they found, among other things, musicians pouring emotion and power into performances. Many of these performances featured Herz-Sommer and, after she and her son were liberated (her husband did not survive), she became a master pianist and music teacher. A film about Herz-Sommer, The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life, is nominated for best short documentary at Sunday’s Academy Awards.

The announcement of her passing – and the reflections on her extraordinary life – remind us of the importance of listening to, of seeking out, the stories of survivors. The stories we should hear are not solely about survivors’ experiences as the persecuted Jews of the Shoah, though these are critically important as individual historical records.

An additional, perhaps equally crucial obligation, is to learn from these survivors about human resilience. The life of Herz-Sommer was extraordinary – and yet, it wasn’t. If her life was extraordinary, then so is the life of every Holocaust survivor who rose above the extreme events they withstood and built for themselves a life, a family, a community, a record of service in myriad disciplines. And, so they are.

What we find most curious, or astonishing, in stories like Herz-Sommer’s and so many others, is that these individuals could come back at all from the horrors they experienced and witnessed to become not just functioning members of society, but ones who excel. The soldiers who liberated the concentration camps of Europe, and the witnesses and aid workers who came after, certainly could not have predicted that these members of the surviving remnant would amount to much. As discussed in a feature story this week, a French government report on the 426 “boys of Buchenwald” inaccurately predicted that the survivors would never rehabilitate, that they were irreparably damaged, physically and emotionally, and would not survive to middle age.

In a world that so frequently seems to have not learned the lessons of the past, where generation after generation of people in various parts of the world still experience and witness atrocities, the examples of how human beings can endure and still thrive after catastrophes provide a lesson sadly still needed today. In retrospect, it is easy to see that even well-intentioned people sent to aid and possibly rehabilitate survivors of the Shoah may have unintentionally, if understandably, written off their potential when they saw the conditions of the survivors and their surroundings. Yet, they underestimated the power of human endurance, which had rarely been so tragically strained.

Each one of the individual survivors’ stories is a testament to human capability. The ultimate lesson may be this: every life is extraordinary. And the ability for human beings to overcome adversity sometimes exceeds the human ability to predict such resilience.

Print/Email
0 Flares Twitter 0 Facebook 0 Google+ 0 0 Flares ×
Posted on February 28, 2014May 8, 2014Author The Editorial BoardCategories From the JITags Academy Awards, Alice Herz-Sommer, The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life, Theresienstadt

Post navigation

Previous Previous post: An organic connection – artists Karen Brumelle and Joanne Waters
Next Next post: How do people remember?
Proudly powered by WordPress