You Made This Clip Go Viral … And Then The Academy Awards Took Notice

Remember her?

Well, if you don’t, refresh your memory with this post.

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If you do, you’ll remember that Alice Herz-Sommer, at 109 years young, was an accomplished pianist who lived through the Holocaust in the concentration camp called Terezín, a feeder camp for the dreaded gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. While she survived and played music throughout the war, her husband and parents weren’t as lucky.

When we posted a clip from the short documentary “The Lady in Number 6,” it went gangbusters on our site, getting almost 1.7 million views to date.

This is a lot of attention for any video. For a short, no-budget documentary, it’s an insane amount of attention. Think about it. What’s the last short documentary you’ve seen or remembered? I’ll wait…

In any case, all of this attention got the producer, Nick Reed, a call from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. His labor of love got nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary (Short Subject)!

Here’s how he remembers it, as told to Upworthy in a phone call:

And then come Oscar night. Well … a picture’s worth a thousand words:

One bit of sad news: Shortly before the Oscars, on Feb. 23, 2014, Alice passed. She was 110.

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