Helen Lewis: HELEN LEWIS, who has died aged 93, survived the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz and went on to became Northern Ireland's first teacher of modern dance.
In one of those bizarre performances demanded by camp commandants, she choreographed the efforts of women half-dead with hunger and herself danced through pain and illness.
She described it in a book published only in 1992, A Time to Speak, a volume distinguished by remarkable restraint.
Her 60-plus years living in Belfast were productive and happy. In 2002 she said: “You always carry the sorrow. You cannot say that the loss of family and friends in the camps is like losing loved ones due to a long illness or old age. To perish that way was a uniquely horrible fate.”
She spoke about the Holocaust well into her 80s. She was sustained, she said, by teaching the skills she thought she had lost in the misery of the camps, by an impressive career as a choreographer for the Lyric Theatre and by love.
She met her second husband Harry when she was 19, he 26, in the little border town of Trutnov/ Trautenau in northern Czechoslovakia, in German-speaking Sudetenland, where she was born. After the war, Harry, then in a new life in Belfast, saw her name on a Red Cross list of camp survivors.
They made contact and she arrived in Belfast two years later.
A recurring nightmare stopped “after the birth of our first child, Michael, in 1949. Robin’s arrival five years later marked the end of transition and the beginning of my integration. From then on I was at home.” Harry died in 1992, just before publication of her book.
The account in A Time to Speakof the loss of her first husband, Paul, and of her mother, who did not survive the camps, is brief.
Of the couple’s final separation in Auschwitz – after two years in Terezin and the horror of the sealed train between the camps in which many died – she wrote: “He was among a group of young men who were sent to work in Germany. Never before had a train with living people left Auschwitz and, as we talked for the last time, we spoke of home and a family. Paul died in Schwarzheide Concentration Camp in April 1945.”
There are almost hallucinatory stories of kindness from several SS officers and of a Russian officer met in the chaos of liberation.
In Prague a policeman brought needle and thread and tea to calm her while she sewed “for her life” the Star of David, pounced upon by another policeman because it was pinned on, not sewn as the rules demanded. The litany of piecemeal bullying regulations helps explain why Jews stayed put amid fear of surrounding chaos and the coming war, in Prague as elsewhere, until, suddenly as it seemed, it was too late to escape.
She was 86 when she told Irish Pageseditor Chris Agee that her survival remained "both a mystery and a miracle. Some who were tough didn't survive – some who weren't, like myself, did. Survival wasn't based on any particular qualities."
People in Belfast were at first reluctant to ask about the camps; when she spoke she met complete disbelief, but she never thought of Belfast as closed to outsiders.
“The strange thing is they have conflicts with themselves, but not with outsiders like myself. Not only strange but perverse – and ridiculous. Our friends have always been from both groups.”
She was made an MBE in 2001 in recognition of her services to dance in Northern Ireland via the Belfast Modern Dance Group, which she helped found.
Helen Lewis: born 1916; died January 31st, 2010