Zoltan Zinn-Collis and Suzi Diamond played together in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp before it was liberated and they were moved to Ireland. It was 50 years before they met again and shared their haunting memories. They talk to Shane Hegarty.
In 1999, Zoltan Zinn-Collis and Suzi Diamond visited Bergen-Belsen, the German concentration camp. They looked at photographs, watched a video, saw the obelisk erected in memory of the victims and visited the reconstructions of buildings destroyed quickly after the camp's liberation. Together they watched the bus loads of tourists pulling up outside.
"A group got off," recalls Zoltan, "and I said, here we go, it's like the Lakes of Killarney." "It's for tourists now," says Suzi, "but for us it is real life, it's not about tourists at all. My mother is buried there and Zoltan's mother is buried there."
Just over 60 years ago, in the winter of 1944, the two first met in a crowded, windowless train carriage on its way to Belsen. He had been taken from Slovakia with his mother, elder brother and two sisters. She had come from Hungary with her brother and mother. Both their fathers had been taken away by the Nazis; neither would be seen again.
Diamond remembers how her mother was given the opportunity to renounce her Jewish husband, but refused. "One day there was just a knock on the door and we were taken away. It was as simple as that." She was only one and a half, yet has strong memories. "I would imagine that there weren't too many younger than me there," she says. "I presume there would have been a few babies in arms, but not many who would have any memories. People say: 'How can you remember anything, you were only one and a half', but I do! It wasn't hearsay or anything I'd seen on the television. I do remember everything, I even remember my home in Hungary."
Her family was moved from its home town to Budapest, and then onto Belsen. "We were the last train that was shipped out of Hungary. It was packed. That's actually where I met Zoltan. We happened to be on the same truck, although we didn't know each other then until we got to our destination. I noticed that there was a large family and the baby kept crying all the time, which you can imagine it got on everybody's nerves. And after a while the baby stopped crying. And you thought 'that's great', but you didn't realise until you were getting off that the baby was dead."
Zoltan, then four years old, remembers his mother fighting over his sister's body with a German soldier. "My mother was on the transport with a bundle. And I remember a German guard grabbing that bundle and throwing it into a ditch. And that bundle was the corpse of my baby sister."
Suzi remembers much of the day-to-day life. The torture of prisoners. The corpses. The rancid smell. How guards would toy with prisoners before killing them. An occasion when a baby was thrown to a guard dog. Because Zoltan's mother spoke Hungarian, their families became close and the children played with each other in the camp.
"It was just a matter of surviving. Zoltan and me used to play whenever we could, though there wasn't very much to play with. Each day the adults tried to give you something to do . . . We'd go out and try and find something, because even a scrap of wood or piece of thread they would find use for."
Suzi bristles at their innocence. "We sat on bodies, until we were told we shouldn't be sitting on them. There was a pile right outside the hut, you couldn't not see it. And it got bigger and bigger and there was nowhere to sit, chairs or tables or anything. And one day we were tired, so I said why don't we just sit down here until someone told us we shouldn't."
Their experiences resurface in adulthood as unusual phobias. Zoltan has never liked the sight of ESB pylons, because they are similar in shape to the gallows at Belsen. Because they were doused with powerful hoses upon arrival, they share a fear of showers. "I had three showers in the house and one bath and I always have the bath. And I didn't realise this until she mentioned that she had a similar thing," says Zoltan.
In a camp in which typhus and TB were rampant, Zoltan's mother died the day the camp was liberated (April 15th, 1945) and his brother died afterwards. "That's something I don't understand, because out of the two of us, he was in better shape than I was. But for whatever reason he died and I'm still here to tell the tale."
Suzi's mother also died after the liberation, and she became an orphan at the age of two. "She knew that she was dying. We all knew it. because after you see someone coughing and coughing for a while and that person dies, when your mother starts doing the same thing you realise what's going to happen."
Among those to visit the camp after the Allies discovered it was Brother Columbanus (Sean) Deegan, who was working with the RAF during the war. Many of the soldiers first believed the stories of the camps to be propaganda tools to keep up the impetus of the Allied sweep into Germany. He decided to investigate and any scepticism was immediately dispelled.
"I won't go into the gruesome details but to see the pathetic way they were looking and the inhuman state they were reduced to, the effect of it . . . it becomes a nightmarish thing if you think about it, so you're inclined not to think about it.
"It made you very angry in that up to that we looked at the average Germans as having been swept along with the whole thing, but now we realised that anyone living in the vicinity of that must have known and accepted it. So you weren't the same type of guy when you left."
After the camp's liberation, Suzi and her brother and the seriously ill Zoltan and his sister were cared for by an Irish Red Cross volunteer, Robert Collis, and his future wife, a Dutch nurse named Han. They and another orphan were brought first to Sweden and then to Ireland, where the Diamond siblings were adopted by the Samuels, who owned a well-known jewellery shop in Grafton Street, and the Zinns by Dr Collis and his first wife. Zoltan says that at the Quaker school in Co Waterford he and his sister were treated "just like a couple of snotty kids, which is what kids need".
It was 1994 before Suzi and Zoltan met again, and only then that they began to talk of their experiences. "So I didn't talk about it until the 50th anniversary," says Zoltan, "and then I told it to strangers."
Now living in Athy, Co Kildare, he visits secondary schools to tell them about the Holocaust. The visit to Belsen, as part of an RTÉ documentary, closed a certain chapter for both of them, although Zoltan became seriously ill after it. He has turned down an offer to return again this year. There have been difficult moments since he began to share his story. He was asked, for instance, to write an article for a school magazine.
"I wrote to my family and I found myself in floods of tears writing this. I asked my sister: 'Would I have sorted out your boyfriends for you?' And I also wrote to my brother: 'Would we have chased after the same woman?', which we probably would. And I apologised to my mother for not having gone to her grave before. And I asked my father, whatever happened to him, would he have been proud of me. And that was the first time I actually acknowledged my family and that was for me very, very emotional."
He feels a duty to tell the story. "I accept what happened to me. It happened to me and I can't 'unhappen' it. I get on with my life. Now it's important to remind people about it, and by the time we get to the 70th anniversary there will be few of us left anyway. And then the whole thing will be forgotten."
He sees how a generation is growing up with little knowledge of what happened. "I was in one school recently and I asked the class what the Holocaust was, and there was silence. But for them, you're talking about something that happened in the last century. Sometimes they don't even know what war I'm talking about, because there have been so many wars since."
Suzi, however, doesn't want people to feel that it is far in the past. "It's not history yet. It is still only within one person's lifetime."