History's handshake had a stronger grip than one might expect. Crossing the threshold of Alice Herz-Sommer's flat in Belsize Park, north London, four years ago, her hand was frail but firm. She was only 106 at the time.

Herz-Sommer, who died last weekend aged 110, was thought to be the oldest living survivor of the Holocaust. The occasion of our last meeting was an interview for the first of two articles about music – as a means of defiance and a life-force – in the concentration camp at Terezín near Prague, where she performed as a pianist of great talent, and survived as one of the most remarkable women I will ever meet.

"Would you like a cup of tea?" she asked. Yes, I replied, but please remain seated, madam, I'll make it. "No, sir!" she retorted. "You remain seated while I make tea," which she did, and talked vivaciously about Prague before her "transport" to Terezín in 1943. "My mother's family played with young Gustav Mahler," she dropped casually into conversation. "Ah yes, Franz Kafka, whom I knew well as a dear friend…"

There were three Terezín ladies in Britain at that time, extraordinary women all. Besides Alice, there was Anka Bergman, who gave birth on the arrivals ramp at Mauthausen concentration camp, and who died at home with her daughter at her side in Cambridge last year aged 96; and the indefatigable Zdenka Fantlova, now the sole survivor and guardian of these memories. Zdenka, Herz-Sommer's pianist friend, still lives on Bayswater Road in London but, aged a mere 92, travels Europe talking about her life and memoir, The Tin Ring.

Terezín was a transit camp for Czech and other Jews en route to Auschwitz. Many of the inmates were artistically talented and the Nazis famously allowed music and theatre to flourish there for grotesque propaganda purposes, captured in a film: The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a City. Almost the entire cast were murdered.

Four significant composers were interned there – Pavel Haas, Hans Krása, Gidon Klein and Viktor Ullmann – along with the main promoter of music in the camp, Rafael Schächter. They all perished in the death camps, though the conductor Karel Ancerl survived to become one of the greatest of his generation with the Czech Philharmonic.

"Music is mankind's greatest miracle," said Herz-Sommer at our last meeting. "From the very first note, one is transported into a higher, other world, and that is how it was when we played or listened in the ghetto."

Schächter "discovered" Herz-Sommer – at 40 an established professional pianist – among the interned musicians. She was playing Beethoven's Appassionata, which, she said, "I performed more than 50 times in Terezín and hundreds of times since". She became a regular at camp concerts, both on stage and in the audience, and accompanied a performance of Verdi's Requiem that many survivors recall as the most memorable of all. Was it a requiem for the dead of the ghetto, for the Jews? "Why not?" she said.

That was the only moment of severity during a morning that was infused by Herz-Sommer's affirmation of life through redemption by art. It was something that she had learned in war and applied to peace. Since our meeting, through times when our country has felt ravaged by the rich, I have treasured her view that "wealth is something of the spirit".

"Rich people are ridiculous." She laughed out loud, splendidly. "They think they have everything, but they have nothing! We who survived the ghetto have our suffering, and the music that lifted us out of suffering, and that makes us richer than any wealthy man."

Alice with her son Raphael before their internment in Terezín. Photograph: Droemer Publishing

Of course I needed to record her recollections of the loading of "transports" (the Nazis' sick word, which their survivors use for lack of any other) to "the east", as their mysterious destination was known. And I needed to ask her about a production of Hans Krása's children's opera Brundibár, filmed by the Nazis and shown to a delegation from the International Red Cross, which was entirely taken in by their apparent benevolence. In reality, only two children in the famous film and photograph of the cast survived: one of them was Herz-Sommer's son, Raphael, who became a cellist – a student of Paul Tortelier. Raphael died in 2001.

On 7 February 1945, Herz-Sommer told me, as the last members of the Jewish council in Terezín were shipped to Auschwitz, she gave a recital, an all-Chopin programme, which she repeated several times until 14 April, five days before Hitler declared to his generals that the war was lost. For those few still in Terezín as the Red Army stormed Berlin, Alice then switched to performances of works by Beethoven and Schubert.

Rather like a vehicle on a steep camber, Herz-Sommer's inclination was to steer our discourse from death to music, shadow to light. In his bicentennial year, we talked about whether Chopin, Polish-born, should be played as Slavonic music, or in a romantic French timbre as per the familiar resident of Paris that he became. (Alice favoured the former approach.)

We talked about progressions and perfection in Bach, about Schubert's late piano sonatas – and thereby the relationship between Jewish inmates and German music. "I have come slowly to appreciate German culture, because of Hitler, obviously," she said. "But what could be more wonderful than Bach, Beethoven and Schubert, the greatest of the Romantics? It all begins with Bach, the philosopher of music."

Most heartening of all was the remark that cued Herz-Sommer's farewell. She said almost suddenly: "Thank you for our conversation, young man, it has been a pleasure. Now I must play. I must begin my playing every day with one hour of Bach." Which continued to be her daily habit long after the age of 106.

And so I left, with a prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier drifting from her window, on the summer breeze across London NW3.