Info:
Duration: 53’ 00”
Narrated by Christopher Nupen
Year of production: 2010
Accolades:
Winner of the World Bronze Medal at the New York Film and Television Festival, 2010
Nominated in the Social Award category at the Rose d’Or Festival 2010
At 110, Alice Sommer Herz was the second oldest person in London, lived entirely alone in a small flat and practised the piano for two and a half hours every day.
She was one of the most remarkable people in the world and was thought of with admiration and affection, by hundreds of thousands of people, as both a sage and a saint.
Her wisdom was evident in almost everything that she said. Her saintliness seen in her almost unique tolerance and her compassion. She had, among her virtues, the gift of true forgiveness.
She was imprisoned, with her six-year-old son, in the Theresienstadt concentration camp and saw unspeakable atrocities but she did not hate her persecutors because she had the wisdom to know that all hatred hurts the soul of the hater, while it makes little or no impression on the hated, except, perhaps, to make them worse.
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She suffered experiences which no human being should have to endure, including the deaths of both her mother and her husband at the hands of the Nazis, and yet she speaks about her experiences with a simplicity and a quiet grace that win the hearts of all who discover her.
In this film she remembers her inability to feed her child in the camp, and to answer his questions, as an indescribable nightmare; she remembers also playing more than 100 concerts in the camp and likens the experience, both for the performers and for the listeners, to religious experience and feeling close to the divine. She is in no doubt that music saved her life in those unimaginable circumstances — and the lives of hundreds of others.
She elaborates on this theme in this film.
At 104 she published a book about her life and experiences. That is to say, two writers in Hamburg compiled a book from hundreds of conversations with her over nearly 3 years.
That book, A Garden of Eden in Hell, rapidly became a best-seller and has already been printed in seven languages.
Gigi Sommer is also the heroine of our prize-winning film, We Want the Light, which, through television, has won her a devoted following in many parts of the world.
She also plays the piano in this film — Schubert, Smetana and Beethoven — in a style which the world has long forgotten. It is the style of Artur Schnabel, who was one of her teachers; a style redolent of a happier and more confident time in music making and one which many will find heartwarming. When Pinchas Zukerman heard it he said, “Wow! You don’t hear phrasing like that any more.”
Film remembers our artists in a way that not one of the other media is quite able to match and Gigi Sommer is a human being, a woman and an artist worth remembering.
This is one of the very few films on a holocaust subject that focuses on hope, tenacity and human dignity rather than on catastrophe and despair.
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