Published: 26 January, 2012
by JOHN GULLIVER

I SHOOK hands with one of the greatest writers of the last century, Franz Kafka, on Tuesday.

Of course, this could not have happened because the great Kafka died nearly 90 years ago.

So I was cheating a bit. 

No, I didn’t shake hands with Kafka himself but I did the next best thing. 

I shook hands with the hand that had touched Kafka many times in real life.

I met one of the oldest women – if not the oldest living woman in Britain – Alice Herz-Sommer who is 108.

And Alice told me at her Belsize Park ground-floor flat that when she was a child, about six or seven, in other words around the year 1910 – that is four years before the beginning of the First World War – that Kafka, who was a friend of her parents, used to visit the Sommer family at their homes in Prague and tell stories to their children, including Alice.

“He was a pessimistic man,” Alice said with a smile, as if she was talking of an incident that had happened yesterday.  “But he made up stories for us!” She was sitting with a telephone and an entry-com phone on a small table in front of her.

Suddenly, a buzzer broke into the conversa­tion and Alice, automat­ic­ally, leaned over and pressed the button on the entry-com. It was a meals- on-wheels delivery.

With a penetrating gaze she went on to mention another great writer, Stefan Zweig, whom she also knew.

Now Stefan Zweig, who is back in fashion, wrote his last novel, Beware of Pity, just before he and his wife, on the run from the Nazis, in the late 1930s, committed suicide in Latin America.

The book was adapted recently by Radio 4.

It is a novel at full gallop, full of philosophical insight.

It is not surprising that Alice met such great European intellectuals – including Gustav Mahler – because her own family were part of the cultured class of Prague.

Behind Alice stood a well-used upright piano which she plays for two hours every day.

Taught from the age of about five, Alice eventually became a world concert pianist – her favourite composer, she said, used to be Schumann, now it is Beethoven.

In her mid-20s she, along with her family, were forced by the Nazis into the Theresienstadt camp.

She is now recognised as the oldest survivor of the Nazi death machine.

My meeting with Alice was, in a sense, courtesy of Bernard Miller who had arranged to take another centenarian, Hetty Bower, a mere 106- year-old, to meet Alice at her ground floor flat where a BBC TV team planned to shoot film for a special documentary.

Alice is visited frequently by a friend, Wendy Richard, who takes her out for walks.

Hetty – who lives at the Mary Feilding home in Highgate – fills much of her time campaigning for something that has been dear to her since her young days in the 1920s: the question of peace.

She visits schools, especially junior schools, to talk to pupils about the need for peace, goes on demonstrations against war, gives talks on the radio, writes articles – like the one she wrote for this newspaper last week.   It is hard to imagine that both of these remarkable women are still playing a part in our public life. An enriching thought, such as the one Alice stated so firmly, that she has been an “optimist” all her life.  

Filled with a natural sense of optimism, is it this, I wonder, that is the secret of her extraordin­ary long life?

Does that mean that as I – sadly a sceptic by nature – will meet the man with the scythe far sooner than  anticipated?

Can an uplifted spirit, one that can soar to a great height, somehow clear the arteries, freshen up the mind and body, and keep the engine going for much longer?

As all this remains a mystery to science, and the God followers, who knows? Alice may have hit on something?

As we left Alice, Bernard, helping Hetty into his car, turned round and said: “It’s been a magical moment!”  Yes, it was almost unreal, a moment between reality and the stars, a moment difficult to forget.