Alice Herz was born on 26 November 1903 in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary, into a cultured German-Jewish family.
Alice Herz was born on 26 November 1903 in Prague, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was the youngest of five children in a secular, cultured German-speaking Jewish family. Her father, Friedrich Herz, was a successful businessman, and her mother, Sofie, was closely connected to Prague's vibrant intellectual and artistic circles, counting figures such as Franz Kafka and Gustav Mahler among family acquaintances.
The household environment nurtured deep engagement with literature and music from an early age; Alice began piano lessons as a small child and quickly displayed exceptional talent. Her sister Irma was also a trained pianist, and the family regularly hosted salons where classical music, philosophy, and literature were discussed and performed.
This early immersion in Prague's rich German-Jewish cultural milieu shaped Alice's lifelong devotion to music, particularly the works of Chopin, Bach, and Beethoven. Her upbringing in this period of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and later interwar Czechoslovakia, provided the foundation for a professional career as a concert pianist and piano teacher, one that would later be tested to an extraordinary degree by the horrors of the Holocaust, through which music itself became her means of survival and resistance.
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