The Woman Who Remembers Mahler: The New Yorker Today, in a one-room flat in Belsize Park, in London, the pianist Alice Herz-Sommer is celebrating her hundred-and-tenth birthday. Her life is extraordinary not only for the years she has counted but for the people she has known and the scenes she has witnessed. She is noted, among other things, for being the oldest living Holocaust survivor. For two years, from 1943 until the end of the war, she was interned at the Theresienstadt camp; her husband, Leopold Sommer, was deported to Auschwitz and later to Dachau, where he died of typhus. She was born in Prague, to a German-Jewish family that consorted with the giants of fin-de-siècle culture. When she was a child, she met Gustav Mahler, and Franz Kafka was a frequent guest of the household. Caroline Stoessinger, the author of the book "A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer," elicited a description of how Kafka had once attended a Passover Seder at the Herz home, singing "Dayenu" with the children. Alice, then eight years old, remembers going to the piano to play Beethoven and Chopin. In 1949, she settled in Israel, teaching at the Jerusalem Academy of Music, and in 1986 she moved to London. More than a century after she performed for Kafka, she is capable of casting a spell at the piano. The other day, Stoessinger forwarded to me a private video that was filmed a few months ago. Herz-Sommer reminisces a bit with her visitors, speaking about her favorite composers - now it is Beethoven, but when she was younger it was Schumann - and about her Jewish background. She then goes to the upright Steinway in her flat and plays the middle section of Schubert's Impromptu in A-Flat Major (Op. 90, No. Her bony fingers struggle at times to reach the notes, and the piano is rather out of tune, but her memory is clear, and she brings to bear an aching, rubato-laden sense of feeling that seems to extend over an abyss of time, across the catastrophes of the twentieth century, to the glittering years before the First World War. I was reminded of what the composer Viktor Ullmann wrote of one of Herz-Sommer's recitals in Theresienstadt: "For her, reproduction is actually creation: she identifies with the work and its creator." On a trip to London last year, I paid Herz-Sommer a brief visit. She lives in an unprepossessing low-rise apartment building, her flat just to the right of the lobby. Stoessinger arranged for a neighbor to accompany me. It was decided that I might make a better impression if I were introduced as a musician rather than a journalist, because Herz-Sommer can find journalists tiring. The tactic misfired somewhat. When I was introduced, she commanded, "Play something," in her richly accented, Central European voice. I sat reluctantly at the upright and stumbled through the first theme of Schubert's great B-Flat-Major Sonata. She stopped me and said, "Now tell me your real profession." I confessed that I was a writer, whereupon she looked a bit sad. Nonetheless, we had a lively chat. I had the impression that she was no longer greatly interested in the past, but she was alert to the present, to comings and goings in her building, to news of recent performances. She spoke fondly of her son, the cellist Raphael Sommer, who died in 2001. But she does not spend her time grieving. In her conversations with Stoessinger, she paraphrased Spinoza: "Don't stand there and cry. Understand. I had hoped that she would be moved to play, but she did not venture to the piano. She did want music, though. After a while, she turned on her transistor radio and held it to her ear. "Mozart!" she barked brightly. I stole away, happy to have touched a hand that reaches into vanished worlds. Photograph by Yuri Dojc.