Music is God

2013 Oscar®-nominated documentary shorts, program A

Crit

OK, I'll readily concede that the chaotic functional form of Karama Has No Walls, about the catastrophic response of regime police and sympathizers to a mostly peaceful sit-in Sana'a, Yemen, in 2011 is grippingly effective; and I will certainly acknowledge the mind-blowing courage exhibited in Facing Fear, about the unlikely alliance in the cause of tolerance between a former skinhead hater and the gay man whom he'd help beat and kick nearly to death years before; and no doubt the two nominees I haven't seen yet (the docs are long for "shorts," so the program is split in 2) will have something to wow me.

But let's face it, platitudes notwithstanding, there can be only one winner, and it's hard to beat a cheerful, cherubic 109-year-old Holocaust-survivor pianist (The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life). Alice Herz grew up in Prague; Mahler and Kafka were friends of the family (Alice and her twin sister would go for walks in the park with Kafka). She became a concert pianist, married a similarly talented cellist Leopold Sommer, had a baby boy; life was beautiful. And then.

Had she not been able to entertain the Nazis, she probably would not be entertaining and edifying us today, but she was assigned to Theresienstadt, the camp used to propagandize how good the Jews had it, and she was skilled enough and lucky enough to avoid being moved along to Auschwitz. She and her son Raphael moved to Israel after the war, and he became a concert cellist.

"It doesn't exist anywhere in our world all bad," she says, and she doesn't just talk a good game. She seems genuinely to see the best in everything--even in Raphael's sudden, mostly painless, terrorless death at age 64. And even in her concentration camp experience.

Someone who saw the film with me complained about some tricky camerawork; I'm sure her criticism is accurate and valid, but I was so captivated, I was oblivious. Maybe not a brilliant film--hard to imagine how you could fail to make this woman unappealing--but what an astonishing human.