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 legitimized. In 1942, Alice's mother was deported. Desperately unhappy, she resolved to learn Chopin's 24 Etudes—the most technically demanding piano pieces she knew—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 100 concerts she gave her fellow prisoners hope in a world of pain and death.

Foreword by Alice Herz-Sommer

'The Story of a Miracle' by Raphael Sommer

1.Twins

2.Roots

3.World War

4.Music

5.Marriage

6.Occupation

7.Theresienstadt

8.Happiness

9.The Gates of Hell

10.Inferno

11.After the Inferno

12.Liberation

13.Homecoming

14.Prague

15.Zena

16.Jerusalem

Epilogue 'Music takes us to paradise'

Notes

Acknowledgements