Helen Lewis: Shadows Behind The Dance – Irish Times review 19th January 2023
During the later years of her long life, dancer Helen Lewis frequently accepted invitations to give public talks and interviews about her wartime experiences. She was routinely introduced as a Holocaust survivor, a label she thoroughly disliked.
It is true that, as a young woman from the German-speaking Sudetenland in the former Czechoslovakia, she had endured unimaginable horrors at the hands of the Nazis. In 1942, along with her husband Paul, she was deported to the Jewish ghetto at Terezin, joining a large number of artistic inmates whose respective talents were exploited by the camp authorities for propaganda purposes.