Montreal director Malcolm Clarke thought that some people might consider Alice Herz-Sommer controversial for being “thankful” – her word – for a very long life that included living through the Holocaust.
Clarke’s remarkable, Oscar-nominated documentary short, The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life, reveals Herz-Sommer, now 110 and the world’s oldest known Holocaust survivor, to be a person who never let the Holocaust dampen her optimistic spirit and who survived her ordeal through her love of music.
The British-born Clarke, a non-Jew who has lived in Quebec since the mid-1990s, told The CJN he was “quite shocked” when he first heard Herz-Sommer express gratitude for everything she’s lived through.
But filming her in her small London apartment “Number 6,” accompanied by Montreal producer Frederic Bohbot and a film crew, he realized that despite her positive attitude toward life, she understood Nazi evil all too well.
Clarke told The …