Tim Cornwell: Face-to-face with a Holocaust survivor

At the age of about 17 at her home in Czechoslovakia, Zdenka Fantlova was woken by her father early in the morning, telling the children to come quickly to the window.

She looked out and saw a “flood of the German army”, men in helmets and motorcycles, moving “endlessly.”

It was 15 March, 1938, between Prague and Pilsen. For a Jewish teenager with a whole life in front of her, she compared what followed to an earthquake, or where victims are thrown around as in a washing machine. But her first reaction was to celebrate getting a day off school.

I’ve known about the Holocaust as long as I can remember. Watching Fantlova speaking this weekend in Ayrshire, however, brought the first face-to-face encounter with a survivor of the death camps. It appeared, asking around at the Boswell Book Festival – an event centred on biography and memoir – that the same, perhaps surprising fact, was true for many middle-aged British people. An American Jewish friend, by contrast, had heard and met several survivors, both within school and his own family.

My experience of Holocaust history runs from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam to a recent return visit to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, an extraordinarily powerful monument, and work of art, where people walking its concrete corridors, appearing briefly and disappearing, provide glimpses of lives snuffed out.

But hearing a living story, from one of the diminishing circle of Holocaust survivors, of people who would have experienced it as adults, was unique. Fantlova, now 90, did not present herself as a broken or enraged person, nor break down in tears, but several in the audience did. Her appearance was followed by a standing ovation.

She was sent first with her family to Theresienstadt, the holding ghetto established inside Czechoslovakia by the SS, from where people were shipped out in cattle trucks for “transport to the East”. After about two and a half years, she was sent first to Auschwitz, then made it to Kurzbach labour camp, survived a 300-mile death march to Gross Rosen labour camp, and then finally Bergen-Belsen.

Survivors’ stories like this – as the only one of 38 in her family to live, through not just one camp but five – almost invite disbelief, leaving one asking how. She had clearly asked it herself; she talked about a blueprint, a “hand of fate”.

The audience reached for shared questions after hearing her story. One was when she came to address her memories. The answer was about 50 years later, after the fall of the Iron Curtain; having lived in Australia and then Britain, she wanted to go back to her home. A book followed, The Tin Ring: How I Cheated Death, centred on the tin ring that her young lover gave her in Theresienstadt, published in Britain by a small regional publisher. What she did not do was go back to that camp; she wanted to keep the memories, she said, and not see the place as it had changed.

Certain memories stand out: her father standing in the doorway before being taken away by the Gestapo for listening to the BBC after he’d been beaten in front of her. Turning to the family and saying: “Stay calm; calmness is strength.” The music and particularly theatre performances that she joined at Theresienstadt, with its semblance of normal life, that gave one and a half hours of humanity. Guards separating those who would live, and die, at Auschwitz, like traffic policemen.

How did she survive? She says she was single, young, healthy and in love, with a “lucky star”. She went on to become an actress for 20 years in Australia.Like other older actresses or actors, performance held her together at a book festival in Ayrshire, over 70 years later. It was only when she left the stage, and struggled to take the single step down from it, with a stick, that her age was apparent.

“If you feel like a victim, you become one,” was one of her observations, and later, for a woman who continues to appear in talks or schools in Europe and the US: “The older we get, the more we have to do.”