Helen Lewis

Helen Lewis MBE (née Katz; 22 June 1916 – 31 December 2009) was a pioneer of modern dance in Northern Ireland, and made her name as a dance teacher and choreographer. A survivor of the Holocaust, she was also known for her memoir of her experiences during the Second World War. Early life Helena Katz was born in 1916 into a German-speaking Jewish family in Trutnov in Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic). After she completed study at the Realgymnasium of Trutnov in 1935, she and her mother moved to Prague; her father had died in the previous year. There she studied dance with Milča Mayerová, who had trained with Rudolf Laban. Katz also studied philosophy at the German University of Prague, and took private lessons in French. In about 1936 she met Paul Hermann, a Czech from a Jewish family, and in 1938, after she had finished her dance training and her university exams, they were married. She taught as an assistant at Mayerová's dance school, and experimented with choreography. War years Following the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, deportations of Jewish families began in August 1941. The Hermanns were sent in 1942 to Terezín; in 1944 they were transferred to Auschwitz and separated. Paul Hermann died in 1945 on a forced march, not long before the end of the Second World War. Helen, who survived two "selections" by Josef Mengele, was later sent to Stutthof concentration camp in northern Poland. When the war ended, she returned to Prague, where she learnt of her husband's death; her mother, who had been deported early in 1942, had been murdered at Sobibór extermination camp. Helen began to correspond with Harry Lewis, a Czech with British nationality whom she had known at school and with whom she had had a brief romance before she met Hermann. She married Lewis in Prague in the summer of 1947 and in October moved to Belfast.