Alice Herz-Sommer died in London on 23 February 2014 at age 110, having been recognized as the oldest known Holocaust survivor at the time of her death.
Alice Herz-Sommer died peacefully in London on 23 February 2014, at the age of 110. At the time of her death she was widely reported to be the oldest known survivor of the Holocaust, having endured imprisonment at Theresienstadt concentration camp during the Second World War alongside her young son.
In her final decades, Herz-Sommer became an internationally recognized symbol of resilience, optimism, and the redemptive power of music and art in the face of unimaginable atrocity. She continued to play piano daily well into her final years, crediting music with sustaining her mental and emotional survival through the camp and throughout her long life. Her story was told in Melissa Müller and Reinhard Piechocki's biography A Garden of Eden in Hell (2006), and, in the same month of her death, in the Oscar-winning documentary short The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life (2013), which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short just days after she died, on 2 March 2014.
Her death was reported globally, with obituaries in The Guardian, The New York Times, the Independent, and the BBC, all highlighting her remarkable philosophy of gratitude, positivity, and the transformative power of art even in humanity's darkest chapters. She is remembered as one of the most compelling voices of Holocaust remembrance and testimony of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.