Overview

‘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 Helen Lewis, a young student of dance in Prague at the outbreak of WW2 was herded, like Madeleine Albright, into the Terezin ghetto, then shipped to Auschwitz, in 1942. Separated from her family, she struggled to survive amidst the carnage of The Final Solution. How she did so, and what she did in order to survive, is a gripping story, told with wit, candour, and controlled anger. Widely praised by many, including Jennifer Johnston, Michael Longley, and the Guardian, and hailed by the Independent for its ‘elegiac simplicity and lucidity’, A Time to Speak is an elegant memoir of the Holocaust, humbling in its freedom from bitterness, which will leave no reader unmoved.

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9780856408557

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'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 '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 '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

Author Information

Helen Lewis MBE, was born in Trutnov, Czechoslovakia. As a young woman she moved to Prague to train as a dancer at Milca Mayerova's School of Dance. She married in 1938, and continued to live in Prague with her husband, Paul. They were only able to enjoy a few months of carefree marriage before the Nazis entred Prague. From 1939 onwards she was the victim of anti-semitism and anti-Jewish laws. In 1942, together with her husband, she was deported to Terezin, the Jewish ghetto, and then to Auschwitz in May 1944, where they were separated, never to see each other again. After the liberation in March 1945 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. The same year Helen settled with him in Belfast. After the birth of their two sons, she became involved in dance again, choreographing for theatre and opera, and her teaching eventually led to the foundation of the Belfast Modern Dance Group. Helen Lewis died on New Years Eve 2009, aged 93.

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