IT REMAINS history’s biggest story, the one that testifies to the evil of which humankind is capable. Many have wanted to forget it all, yet there are those who believe the Holocaust should never be forgotten. Zdenka Fantlova, born and raised in the old Czechoslovakia, is one.
By the time Bergen-Belsen was liberated 65 years ago this month, she was virtually an emaciated ghost who had to persuade the British soldier who challenged her entry into a Red Cross post at the camp, to allow her to stay there. He had ordered her to return to her block and wait her turn to be evacuated.
She knew she was dying and was aware that this was her final test. Fortunately she had sufficient English to plead calmly with him: “I know with absolute certainty that if I go back to my own block I shall be dead by morning.”
Now 88 and long settled in London, she is determined that the horrors she lived through do not die with her and her fellow survivors.
Her life as a child with a lively curiosity and later as a young girl, newly in love, were spent in the industrial town of Rokycany, about 80km from Prague. Life was good until the war began when, suddenly, to be a Jew was crime.
It took her more than 50 years to write it all down; when her account, The Tin Ring, was initially published in Czech, in the Czech Republic, in 1996, she became a national figure. The German publication the following year also led to a series of interviews. The US edition, titled My Lucky Star, came out in 2001, and it has just been published in the UK under its original title, to coincide with the anniversary of her rescue. It is a story that astonishes all who hear it.
There are many ironies; not least that after all the inhumanity inflicted on the prisoners in the death camps, the liberators imposed further restrictions. The British arrived at Bergen-Belsen on April 15th 1945; the first task was to remove the 13,000 corpses in the camp. During this operation, many who had “survived” the Nazis ended up dying.
About 12 or 13 days passed between the moment Fantlova first heard the rumours that the British had arrived, and her own meeting, 65 years ago this week, with the soldier whom she still regards as her saviour and to whom she has dedicated the book.
Ironically, when Fantlova’s British publisher, Andrew Peden-Smith of Northumbria Press, began discussing the book and its coverage with various British newspapers he was told that people were no longer interested in the Holocaust.
Fantlova, whose mother, father, brother and sister died in the camps, remains one of life’s optimists; she only stopped going to the gym two years ago on reaching 86.
She had grieved for Arno, the young man who had given her the tin ring of the title, which she had risked death in the camps to protect. After she was liberated and restored to health in Sweden, she was strong enough to begin another relationship, and when that ended badly, she refused to become bitter. Eventually she did marry, a German Jew named Charles Ehrlich; she had an acting career in Australia and believes that life is something you fight for.
Long before the war began, the family had known tragedy; her maternal grandmother who suffered from depression had killed herself as a young woman, leaving Fantlova’s mother, Betty, an orphan at 18. Her life would be short. Betty died of an illness when she was 28, and Fantlova was three and a half.
After Fantlova’s father had been arrested by the Gestapo soon after war was declared, the Jewish population in Czechoslovakia was suddenly rounded up and transported to Terezin, a fortress town northwest of Prague.
Terezin was a self-contained ghetto. On first arriving there, Fantlova, then 18, noticed the number of sick and elderly. “About two hundred died every day.” While at Terezin she became involved in the theatrical shows prisoners staged. Many of the entertainments had a satirical edge to them. Sometimes the Nazis were not amused. A steady drain saw people being moved, transported to their deaths.
By the autumn of 1944, the Germans were in retreat. Terezin was closed. At first the young men were sent away, supposedly for work. Her brother disappeared in this way. Within a week her mother, younger sister and herself were ordered into cattle carts for a 29-hour ordeal that ended at a station displaying a sign: Auschwitz-Birkenau. Soon after arrival, her mother was gassed. Aside from the starvation and the brutal treatment, the prisoners were denied all rights, their heads were shaved, their clothing removed.
Her ordeal ended in Bergen-Belsen, as, almost, did her life. Her will to live saved her, as did a piece of advice given to her father when he was arrested. “Just keep calm.”
She did.
The Tin Ringby Zdenka Fantlova is published by Northumbria Press, price £15
Give Me a Break, by Kate Holmquist, returns next week
