Zuzana Ruzickova

Zuzana Ruzickova (1927-2017)

Zuzana Ruzickova, who survived Nazi concentration camps and a Communist dictatorship in the former Czechoslovakia to become one of the world’s most renowned harpsichordists and a leading interpreter of Bach, died on Sept. 27 in Prague. She was 90. Ms. Ruzickova is widely credited as the first harpsichord soloist to record Bach’s complete works for keyboard instruments — passionate and spirited music that was the one constant in a turbulent life in which she survived the gas chambers, devastating disease, slave labor and crippling hand injuries. “Bach provides a sense of order in a world of disorder,” Ms. Ruzickova said. Her husband, the composer Viktor Kalabis urged her to be “the Jew who brought Bach back to Germany” and to “play Bach to make them realize that there is another Germany, that Hitler didn’t destroy all the great culture.”

Ms. Ruzickova was born on Jan. 14, 1927, in Pilsen, Bohemia, the daughter of a prosperous Jewish family. She performed slave labor for the Germans in Hamburg, returned home with her hands too enfeebled to strike a keyboard, and survived renewed anti-Semitism in Communist Czechoslovakia. Moreover, the Czech regime condemned the harpsichord itself as a feudal and religious instrument.
When Ms. Ruzickova was 15, the family received what the Germans called “an invitation” to Terezin, which the Nazis considered a model concentration camp for the cultural elite. Her grandparents and father died of disease there. Within six months, she and her mother were shipped to Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland, where she survived the gas chamber twice — first after lying about her age, and then when the camp’s routine was upset by the Allied invasion on D-Day. She and her mother were then transferred to bomb-ravaged Hamburg, where she repaired oil pipelines, worked in a cement factory and dug tank traps. 

Cover of one of the 100 records she recorded of Bach's works.

Early in 1945 they were shipped again, this time to Bergen-Belsen, a German concentration camp, where tens of thousands died from malnutrition and disease. She weighed 70 pounds and had malaria when the camp was liberated that April. With her hands badly damaged during the war, Ms. Ruzickova practiced 12 hours a day to catch up after it was over. She attended the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague from 1947 to 1951, when she gave her first harpsichord recital.

After Czechoslovakia became part of the Soviet bloc, she refused to join the Communist Party. But the country’s Soviet-backed regime indulged her, content with confiscating much of the foreign currency she had earned. She never defected because she and her husband feared for their relatives in Czechoslovakia. Ms. Ruzickova made more than 100 recordings. Her monumental project of recording Bach’s complete keyboard works took a decade, starting in 1965. The underlying message of this post is: Never, ever give up!