I absolutely love this 2014 Oscar winning documentary short about Alice Herz-Sommer, who until last year was the world’s oldest living pianist and the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor.
Her extraordinary optimism and passion for music got her through the worst of all possible situations, not just as a survivor but as someone almost ridiculously happy to be alive.
I suggest you just watch the 11 minute trailer to see and hear it all for yourself:
For Alice, music was the only thing that offered her hope, becoming for her a religion.
As Beethoven said, “Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.”
At one moving point in the documentary, she declares that “It is a mystery that when the first tone of music starts, it goes straight away in our soul…Music is God.”
Words never really teach, only experience does.
Teaching by example may be the only bridge between the two and that’s What Alice Herz-Sommer’s life offers us.
Like Immaculée Ilibagiza in MIRACLE IN RWANDA, her ability to transform an unimaginable horror (the Holocaust/genocide) offers endless wisdom on how to live a long and happy life.
For Immaculée it was her Catholic faith but perhaps more importantly her ability to focus and to forgive.
For Alice, it was her ability to continuously find the beauty in any moment (“Even the bad is beautiful”) especially through the pure beauty of music.
At the end of the trailer, she declares “Only when we are so old are we aware of the beauty of life.”
Through her inspiration though, we might just have have our eyes, ears, and hearts opened a bit more, right here and now.
