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oldest known holocaust survivor dies    
Oldest-known Holocaust survivor dies at 110 By Sylvia Hui and Robert Barr Associated Press Alice Herz-Sommer, believed to be the oldest Holocaust survivor,

died Sunday at age 110, a family member said. The accomplished pianist's death came just a week before her extraordinary story of surviving two years in

a Nazi prison camp through devotion to music is up for an Oscar. Herz-Sommer died in a hospital after being admitted Friday with health problems, daughter-in-law

Genevieve Sommer said. "We all came to believe that she would just never die," said Frederic Bohbot, producer of the documentary "The Lady in Number 6:

Music Saved My Life. "There was no question in my mind, would she ever see the Oscars. The film, directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Malcolm Clarke, has

been nominated for best short documentary at the Academy Awards on March 2. Herz-Sommer, her husband and her son were sent from Prague in 1943 to a concentration

camp in the Czech city of Terezin - Theresienstadt in German - where inmates were allowed to stage concerts, in which she frequently starred. An estimated

140,000 Jewish people were sent to Terezin, and 33,430 died there. About 88,000 were moved on to Auschwitz and other death camps, where most of them were

killed. Herz-Sommer and her son, Stephan, were among fewer than 20,000 who were freed when the notorious camp was liberated by the Soviet army in May 1945.

Yet she remembered herself as "always laughing" during her time in Terezin, where the joy of making music kept prisoners going. "When we play, it cannot

be so terrible," she once recalled. Caroline Stoessinger, a New York concert pianist who wrote "A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer,

the World's Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor," said she interviewed numerous people who were at the concerts who said "for that hour they were transported

back to their homes, and they could have hope. Herz-Sommer was born on Nov. 26, 1903, in Prague and started learning the piano from her sister at age 5.

She married Leopold Sommer in 1931. Their son was born in 1937, two years before the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1942, her 73-year-old mother was

transported to Terezin, then a few months later to Treblinka, an extermination camp. From then on, she took refuge in the 24 Etudes of Frederic Chopin,

a dauntingly difficult monument of the repertoire. She labored at them for up to eight hours a day. She recalled an awkward conversation on the night before

her departure to the concentration camp with a Nazi who lived upstairs and called to say that he would miss her playing. She remembered him saying: "I

hope you will come back. What I want to tell you is that I admire you, your playing, hours and hours, the patience and the beauty of the music.'