Musician survived Nazi prison camp
LONDON - Alice Herz-Sommer, believed to be the oldest Holocaust survivor, died at age 110 Sunday, a family member said. The accomplished pianist’s death came just a week before her extraordinary story of surviving two years in a Nazi prison camp through devotion to music and her son is up for an Oscar.
Herz-Sommer died in a hospital after being admitted Friday with health problems, said daughter-in-law Genevieve Sommer.
“We all came to believe that she would just never die,” said Frederic Bohbot, a producer of the documentary The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life. “There was no question in my mind, ‘Would she ever see the Oscars?’”
The film, directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Malcolm Clarke, has been nominated for Best Short Documentary at the Academy Awards on Sunday.
Herz-Sommer, her husband and her son were sent from Prague in 1943 to a concentration camp in the Czech city of Terezin - Theresienstadt in German - where inmates were allowed to stage concerts in which she frequently starred.
An estimated 140,000 Jews were sent to Terezin and 33,430 died there. About 88,000 were moved to Auschwitz and other death camps, where most of them were killed. Herz-Sommer and her son, Stephan, were among fewer than 20,000 who were freed when the notorious camp was liberated by the Soviet army in May 1945.
Though she never learned where her mother died after being rounded up, and her husband died of typhus at Dachau, in her old age she expressed little bitterness.
“We are all the same,” she said. “Good, and bad.”
Her son, who changed his first name to Raphael after the war, made a career as a concert cellist. He died in 2001.
Singer from family in Sound of Music
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
STOWE, Vt. - Maria von Trapp, the last surviving member and second-eldest daughter of the musical family whose escape from Nazi-occupied Austria was the basis for The Sound of Music, has died. She was 99.
Von Trapp died at her home in Vermont on last Tuesday, according to her brother Johannes von Trapp.
Maria von Trapp was the last surviving member of the seven original Trapp Family Singers made famous in The Sound of Music. She was portrayed as Louisa in the 1959 Broadway musical and a 1965 film.
She was the third child and second-oldest daughter of Austrian Naval Capt. Georg von Trapp and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead von Trapp. Their seven children were the basis for the singing family in the musical and film.
The Sound of Music was based loosely on a 1949 book by von Trapp’s second wife, also Maria von Trapp, who died in 1987. It tells the story of an Austrian woman who married a widower with seven children and teaches them music.
In 1938, the family escaped from Nazi-occupied Austria and performed concert tours throughout Europe and then a three-month tour in America. The family settled in Vermont in the early 1940s and opened a ski lodge in Stowe.
Von Trapp played accordion and taught Austrian dance with sister Rosmarie at the lodge.
She wrote in a biography posted on the Trapp Family’s website that she was born in the Austrian Alps after her family fled fighting from World War I and that she was surrounded by music growing up.
Rosmarie von Trapp, Johannes von Trapp and Eleonore Von Trapp Campbell were born to Georg von Trapp and Maria von Trapp.
Arkansas, Pages 10 on 02/25/2014