What’s Your Excuse?

As the Yogis teach, being a good human being—treating everyone with warmth and respect—is your most fundamental responsibility.

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Transcript

Alice Herz-Sommer had every reason to hate. The Nazis had destroyed her life as Prague's celebrated concert pianist, murdered her mother in the camps, killed her husband in Dachau, and imprisoned her with her six-year-old son in Theresienstadt concentration camp. And yet, at age 110, she would become known not just as the world's oldest Holocaust survivor, but as its most joyful.

In the darkest moments of her imprisonment, Alice chose music and kindness as her rebellion against despair. She performed more than 100 concerts in the camp, her fingers bringing Bach, Chopin, and Beethoven to life for fellow prisoners, creating islands of beauty in an ocean of suffering. Hunger gnawed and cold penetrated to the bone, but she refused to let hatred take root in her heart.

When liberation came, Alice faced a choice that would define her remaining years. Where many might have nursed their wounds with bitterness, she chose to embrace life anew. She refused to break. In Israel, she rebuilt her existence note by note, teaching music and spreading the joy she had never surrendered. The piano sang daily. Her fingers remembered. In her final years in London, she maintained a daily ritual of practicing piano for hours, greeting every person with genuine warmth, and insisting with unwavering conviction that life was beautiful.

"I look at the good. When you are relaxed, your body is always relaxed. When you are pessimistic, your body behaves in an unnatural way. It is up to us whether we look at the good or the bad. When you are nice to others, they are nice to you. When you give, you receive," she would say. She lived these words daily. The maintenance worker received the same radiant smile as the famous musician.

When discussing her past, instead of dwelling on the horrors she endured, she talked about the quiet heroism of prisoners helping each other. The power of music to lift broken spirits. The stubborn persistence of human dignity in the face of degradation.

The Yogis teach that our highest calling is to embody goodness and spread light through our actions. Alice demonstrated this by choosing gratitude when resentment would have been easier. By finding optimism when pessimism beckoned. And most remarkably, by holding fast to kindness when bitterness might have felt more justified.

If Alice, who had every conceivable reason to be bitter, chose joy and love. What's your excuse for not choosing to be kind? As the Yogis teach, being a good human being—treating everyone with warmth and respect—is your most fundamental responsibility.