A Garden Of Eden In Hell

Download or read book A Garden of Eden in Hell written by Melissa Muller and published by Pan. This book was released on 2007-10-01 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alice Herz-Sommer was born in 1903 in Prague, the Prague of the Hapsburgs and of Franz Kafka, a family friend. Musically very gifted, by her mid-teens Alice was one of the best-known pianists in Prague. But as the Nazis swept across Europe, her comfortable, bourgeois world began to crumble around her, as anti-Jewish feeling not only intensified but was legitimised. In 1942, Alice's mother was deported. Desperately unhappy, she resolved to learn Chopin's 24 Etudes and the complex but beautiful music saved her sanity. A year later, she, too - together with her husband and their six-year-old son - was deported to a concentration camp. But even in Theresienstadt, music was her salvation and in the course of more than a hundred concerts she gave her fellow-prisoners hope in a world of pain and death.