A Time to Speak

Imprint Information

First published in 1992 by Blackstaff Press

This edition published in 2011 by

Blackstaff Press

4c Heron Wharf, Sydenham Business Park

Belfast BT3 9LE

© Helen Lewis, 1992

© Foreword and ‘A Linen Handkerchief’, Michael Longley, 2010

© Foreword to the 1992 edition, Jennifer Johnston, 1992

© Photograph of Helen Lewis, Pacemaker Press International, 2010

© Photograph of A Family Wedding, Prague, Michael Lewis and Robin Lewis, 2010

All rights reserved

Helen Lewis has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Cover design by Dunbar Design

Produced by Blackstaff Press

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

EPUB ISBN 978-0-85640-870-0

MOBI ISBN 978-0-85640-871-7

www.blackstaffpress.com

Praise for Helen Lewis

‘Helen Lewis survived the greatest nightmare ever dreamed by man. Her story is appalling, mesmerising, and one reads with increasing gratitude for her clarity, honesty and courage.’

Ian McEwan

‘Only the dead know the whole truth and some of those witnesses who survived have taken upon themselves the painful task of speaking for them … This book is the testimony of a woman who has survived the unsurvivable.’

Jennifer Johnston

‘In A Time to Speak Helen Lewis maps Hell and in so doing gives us an irreproachable work of art. Guiding us over the nightmare ground, she doesn’t put a foot wrong. Her voice remains low-key, her style simple. Such modest utterance conceals the agony of recollection.’

Michael Longley

‘It is a story of almost unbelievable suffering, but it is told in such a way as to leave the reader almost exhilarated … remarkable for its elegiac simplicity and lucidity, its irresistible momentum, its formidable integrity and its impressive lack of self-pity or rancour. It is short, approachable, gripping and patently honest … everybody should read it.’

Independent

‘What singles this book out from other first-hand accounts of the Holocaust is Lewis’s ability to see humanity where, in all fairness, she had no right to see it … she refuses to dehumanise the very people who were trying to dehumanise her – a rare achievement for someone in her position.’

Guardian

‘Told in a matter-of-fact style which at times belies the horror of her story … leaves a lasting impression, not so much of the terrible degradation and deprivation that was Auschwitz but rather of the little incidences of kindness, defiance and humility which, in the midst of all the heartbreak, continued to reflect the human spirit … this book is a wonderful testament to all those who suffered during the Holocaust.’

Sunday Tribune

‘To bear witness as she does – in wonderfully graceful language – to the very nadir of human experience is an heroic act … a wonderful book.’

Irish Press

‘a remarkable book – remarkable above all in its dispassionate approach to unimaginable experiences … All of this makes inspiriting, searing and enthralling reading. It is a book to cherish.’

Patricia Craig, Independent on Sunday

Helen Lewis

Helen Lewis was born in 1916 in Trutnov in Czechoslovakia. She completed her grammar school education, then successfully auditioned for a place at Milča Mayerovà’s School of Dance in Prague. While studying for her diploma, she also began a course in Philosophy at the German University. She married in 1938, and in 1942, together with her husband Paul, she was deported to Terezín, the Jewish ghetto sixty kilometres north of Prague, and then in May 1944 to Auschwitz, where they were separated. After the liberation she returned to Prague to learn that her husband had not survived.

In 1947 she married Harry Lewis, an old friend who had escaped to Belfast just before the start of the war, and settled there with him the same year. After the birth of their two sons, she became involved in dance again, choreographing for theatre and opera. Her teaching eventually led to the foundation of the Belfast Modern Dance Group, which introduced modern contemporary dance to Northern Ireland.

A Time to Speak was first published in 1992 and brought Helen wider recognition as a writer, broadcaster and speaker. She often spoke about her experiences to community groups and in schools, a responsibility she took particularly seriously. Her contribution to the life of Northern Ireland was recognised by the award of honorary doctorates by the University of Ulster (1993) and Queen’s University, Belfast (1996) and by her appointment as MBE in 2000. She died on 31 December 2009.

A Linen Handkerchief

for Helen Lewis

Northern Bohemia’s flax fields and the flax fields

Of Northern Ireland, the linen industry, brought Harry,

Trader in linen handkerchiefs, to Belfast, and then

After Terezín and widowhood and Auschwitz, you,

Odysseus as a girl, your sail a linen handkerchief

On which he embroidered and unpicked hundreds of names

All through the war, but in one corner the flowers

Encircling your initials never came undone.

Michael Longley

Foreword by Michael Longley

There are many people who have given their lives to dancing. But there are not too many who can truthfully say that dancing saved their lives. Yet that is what happened to me.

This was Helen Lewis speaking in an interview about how she survived the Jewish ghetto of Terezín, and then Auschwitz. In A Time to Speak she describes the escalation of horrors, and then the merciful sequence of flukes that brought her, against all the odds, to live in Belfast in 1947. For many years a well-known choreographer and teacher of dance in the city, she founded the Belfast Modern Dance Group in the early sixties. Her artistic response to the Holocaust was first of all expressed through dance, in such works as Phases and There is a Time – dance theatre that would have seemed rather avant-garde in the Northern Ireland of the time.

Encouraged by her sons Michael and Robin, Helen started to write A Time to Speak in 1986, composing it in longhand for her husband Harry to type out on his antique Olivetti. In a letter to me Robin Lewis says: ‘It crystallised many years of oral recounting to her family ... The birth of her first grandchild Daniel in October 1986 was almost certainly the stimulus which led her to create a permanent written record of her experiences for another generation.’ Helen asked me to look over her work. I felt honoured when heavy envelopes started dropping through our letterbox containing drafts of the chapters that would eventually become her astonishing memoir. We would meet in my home or just down the road in her house to look over each new instalment. Harry would pop his smoky head round the door. ‘Who’d have thought I had married such a pearl,’ he would quip. Helen was a natural stylist and storyteller. I was no more than a French polisher. I recommended Helen’s book to Anne Tannahill of Blackstaff Press, who later described the publication of A Time to Speak as the highlight of her career. With a passionate foreword by Jennifer Johnston, the book appeared in October 1992. Enthusiastic reviews and articles followed and it became an Irish bestseller, serialised on rté, published in America, and in translation in Italy and the Czech Republic.

In A Time to Speak Helen Lewis maps Hell and in so doing gives us an irreproachable work of art. Guiding us over the nightmare ground, she doesn’t put a foot wrong. Her voice remains low-key, her style simple. Such modest utterance conceals the agony of recollection. It is heroic to bear witness as Helen does to the very nadir of human experience. Without raising her voice in bitterness or anger, she tells us about the transports in suffocating cattle wagons; the casual allocation of life and death in what were called ‘selections’; starvation and disease; the interminable roll calls in all weathers; the crazy, perverted rules; dysentery and lice; the deadly whims of the all-powerful; beatings and torture and executions; the death marches in which prisoners and guards ‘were bound to each other by hate, fear and degradation’.

Again and again Helen chooses just one or two images to convey the horror: the hour in the washhouse spent ‘snatching the precious trickle of water from each other’; or, at the midday meal, ‘the angle of the ladle’ on which life itself depended, because ‘if the ladle was lying fairly flat on the surface you got a bowl of warm water with a faint aroma of what might have been. But if the ladle plunged vertically into the barrel, it came up with turnip, a bit of barley, perhaps even the odd potato.’ The storyteller in Helen knows that when the world is surreal – ‘all reason and logic gone’ – the details speak for themselves. In Auschwitz ‘nature had died, alongside the people. The birds had flown from the all-pervading black smoke of the crematoria and their departure had left a silence that was like a scream.’

The earlier chapters of A Time to Speak show how the Nazis first confused and diminished those whom they were going to destroy. The Nuremberg race laws introduced by Hitler in September 1935 were regularly augmented over the next decade and enforced mercilessly. Germany’s cankered authoritarians passed laws for confiscating from Jews their bank accounts, their homes, their jewellery, their radios and even their pets. We witness in these pages civilisation disintegrating as step by step it abandons the Jews. Helen writes: ‘Public parks, swimming pools, theatres, cinemas, restaurants and coffee houses were all forbidden.’ Their ration cards were worth much less than those given to everyone else. Travel was restricted to special carriages and certain hours. The introduction of the yellow star, to be worn in public at all times, meant that ‘we were visible targets for anyone who chose to abuse or attack us’. Prolonged humiliation on such a scale was very cunningly planned. It led inexorably to ultimate abasement: tattooed numbers instead of names; identities obliterated in slave labour and the gas chambers. The Final Solution was, among other terrible things, a bureaucratic triumph.

A Time to Speak wins through in the end as a celebration of life and art. At its heart are the wonderful pages where Helen relates how she was saved, for a while at least, by her gifts. Exhausted and close to death, she found herself involved in one of those weird cultural events which the Nazis occasionally set up in order to complicate the nightmare – a ballet performed by inmates of the death camp:

After half an hour the valse from Coppélia had assumed some form and shape. This in itself was remarkable in the circumstances, but what had taken place inside myself was miraculous. I had forgotten the time and the place and I had even forgotten myself. I hadn’t noticed that it had become quiet in the hall, that the other rehearsals had stopped and that everyone was standing round watching. Finally, I felt satisfied: where there had been chaos, there was now a dance. The girls were delighted, there was a burst of applause and shouting; the shouting became a refrain: ‘Dance for us, please dance for us.’

The trance held. I took off my wooden shoes, the excellent accordionist played a South American tango, and I danced. Where was the hunger, the fear, the exhaustion? How could I dance with my frostbitten feet? I didn’t care or try to understand, I danced and that was enough. When I finished they hugged and kissed me, calling me their ‘star’ and lifted me up on their shoulders. Some gave me bread and a bit of margarine and