A Time to Speak

by Helen Lewis

Overview

15 March 1939: German troops enter Prague and for Czechoslovakian Jews the terror begins. This is the incredible story of one survivor of the Holocaust.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786704866
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	11/17/1997
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	861,003
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Helen Lewis was born in 1916 in Trutnov in Czechoslovakia. She completed her grammar school education, then successfully auditioned for a place at Milca Mayerova'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 Modem Dance Group, which introduced modern contemporary dance to Northern Ireland.

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

Editorial Reviews

This slender book is another worthy addition to the shelf of Holocaust memoirs. Lewis, a Czech Jewish dancer and choreographer, was living a pleasant life of the arts with her husband, Paul, when the Nazis annexed Czechoslovakia and introduced Germany's anti-Jewish laws. Lewis describes the rapid descent from middle-class comfort as she and her family and friends found themselves barred from most public accomodations, forced to wear the hated yellow star, placed under curfew, stripped of jobs and belongings (even pets), and finally transported to the ghetto of Terezin, a way station to the death camps. From her arrival at Terezin and later at Auschwitz to the end of the war, Lewis struggled with health problems that threatened to speed her to the gas chambers. Her talent as a dancer saved her life, attracting the eye of a brutal female camp commander. Much of what is here is not new, but Lewis's flat, dispassionate prose gives the book's grimmest moments an unholy power. This book is a useful reminder of what can happen if hatred runs unchecked in seemingly civilized societies. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Two women speak out in personal memoirs about their experiences during the Holocaust. Both led secure, assimilated Jewish lives before the war--Lewis in Prague and Bonin in Berlin. The coming of the Nazis shattered the worlds they knew forever. Lewis gives a vivid firsthand account of her life as a young married dancer in Prague. Her bliss ended the day German troops entered Prague (March 15, 1939). Lewis and her husband, Paul, were sent to the ghetto at Theresienstadt (or Terezin) along with the entire Jewish population of Bohemia and Moravia. After Terezin came Auschwitz, where she was separated from her husband, who later died. She survived, in an almost surreal way, by using her skills to choreograph Coppelia for the commandant's Christmas party. After the war, Lewis remarried and became involved in dance again. Bonin's father told her for the first time that she and the family were Jewish in 1933, when she was 12. She escaped to Palestine, where she worked on a kibbutz as a pioneer; she went on to fight on the side of the British, based in Alexandria, Egypt. The narrative in this section of the book consists of letters to Bonin from her parents until the outbreak of the war and the diaries that she kept during the years she spent in the British Army, 1942-46. In 1947 she came to America, where she has been an academic. Both books are examples of extraordinary courage and defiance. Recommended for all libraries.-- Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, Md.

Library Journal