Dancing under the Gallows

"Dad, you MUST watch the trailer for "Alice Dancing under the Gallows," said my daughter, who had phoned me just to tell me that. "It's on You Tube." Since she's a sensible woman, not given to trivialities, I followed her advice. I'm glad I did, because as usual she was right.

The trailer is for a documentary film about Alice Sommer, who, 106 at the time of filming, is the world's oldest Holocaust survivor. In 1942 she was a well-known concert pianist living in Prague, when, at age 39, she was deported to Theresienstadt, along with her six-year-old son, Rafi. The Nazis employed that camp as a propaganda device, to show the world how well they were treating Europe's Jews. Thus, starving actors and musicians performed for the other starving prisoners. Under the constant threat of extermination, both performers and audiences were, in the words of one of Alice Sommer's friends, "dancing under the gallows."

For propaganda purposes, children were allowed to stay with their parents, the only concentration camp in which this was done. Alice Sommer remembers giving more than 100 performances - playing, for example, the complete Chopin Etudes by heart - while being unable either to feed her son or to explain to him the reason. He sang in the children's choir and, with his mother's support, also survived the war.

She now lives alone in a small flat in North London, where friends visit her in the afternoon and where she practices the piano for two and a half hours a day. People stop on the sidewalk outside the building to listen to her music. Her playing of Bach, Mozart, and Chopin serves as background to her interview. Music, she believes, saved her life. "Music is God."

"I never hate," she said, not even the Nazis, for hatred breeds hatred. Deeply interested in the lives of those she meets, she loves people, she tells the interviewer. "I love everyone." What strikes the viewer is her radiant happiness. "Every day, life is beautiful." She suffered unimaginably during the two years of her incarceration, yet she remains an optimistic, positive woman, who considers herself the luckiest person in the world. It's important, she said, not to complain but to look at the bright side of things and to be aware of the beauty of life.

I watched the video shortly after listening to Krista Tippett's "On Being" (formerly known as "Speaking of Faith"), an American Public Media program broadcast by NPR on October 28. She moderated a roundtable discussion on "pursuing happiness," in which the participants included His Holiness, the fourteenth Dali Lama and Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom. As I listened to Alice Sommer, I was struck by the resonance of her words with the statements made by these men.

"The whole purpose of life is for happiness," said His Holiness, who, like Alice Sommer, radiates happiness. "The whole purpose of our existence is for happiness." Rabbi Sacks seemed to agree that we were made to be happy, for he cited the Jerusalem Talmud. This ancient commentary holds that in the World to Come each us will be held to account for all the legitimate pleasures we denied ourselves.

The Dali Lama has known exile and suffering but, he said, he always looks for the possibility of good inherent in tragedy. In turn, Rabbi Sacks cited the biblical report of Jacob's wrestling with the angel. "I will not let you go," Jacob told the angel, "until you bless me." Rabbi Sacks said that he will not let go of suffering until he finds the blessing it contains.

After surviving the hell of Theresienstadt, nothing again ever seemed worth complaining about, said Alice Sommer. That she remains optimistic and good humored, laughing frequently during her interview, is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit and an inspiration for us all.