Zoltan Zinn-Collis - Final Witness My journey from the holocaust to Ireland

FINAL WITNESS

My Journey from the Holocaust to Ireland

Zoltan Zinn-Collis

with

Alicia McAuley

First published in 2006 by

Maverick House Publishers, Office 19, Dunboyne Office Park, Dunboyne, Co Meath, Ireland.

www.maverickhouse.com

ISBN: 1-905379-18-8
978-1-905379-18-7

Copyright for text 2006 Zoltan Zinn-Collis and Alicia McAuley.Unless otherwise stated, copyright for images collection of Zoltan Zinn-Collis.

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a newspaper, magazine or broadcast. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ZOLTANS JOURNEY

from Slovakia to Ireland via Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

Original artwork

Daniel Shaw-Smith

Contents

Acknowledgements

I HAVE IT ON GOOD AUTHORITY that it is customary, when one has written a book, to dedicate it to someone or something.

Just before I do that, I would like to thank my minder and spelling corrector in this endeavour. She has listened to me waffle, babble and answer questions she never even asked, at all times with a gentle smile and a rather bemused expression. We started off with one confused person; now we have two. But nonetheless, this is the beginning of a story, and between us we have managed to arrive at an end. Well done, Alicia. It could not have been easy.

I want to dedicate this work to my wife and daughters, for their support and help with iteven though they made it quite clear that they were glad to get me out from under their feet. Dont you have something to write? has become the standard reply to any offer of household helpfulness since I began this book. There could not be many things worse than an old man in a precarious medical condition offering to help in things where he would be a definite hindrance, if not a direct danger to the health and safety of all concerned. So Siobhan, Caroline, Nichola, Emma and Joan, I forgive you for any slights or disparaging remarks against me, real or imagined.

This work is for the women in my lifemy four daughters, and my wife, Joan, who gave them to me. In the five of you I have managed to create a new life, and latch on to some of that which circumstances forced me to miss out on for so many years. Of course, it has not all been walking hand in hand down the golden way, smelling the flowers as we passed by. For heavens sake, we are a family. We have had our rows. I have demanded to know where you were going and with whom, when you were coming back, and how. I have embarrassed you, as a daddy does. I have been such a mean daddy, hated, never to be spoken to again.

And looking back, it has been wonderful.

Now four males have come into this, my family. Two grandsons and one granddaughter have also appeared, and have made it more wonderful still.

Yeats, Beckett, Joyce and the rest of you, you are safe in your positions. You will not be eclipsed by my few lines. But to me they matter. They have issued from my heart to the ones I love, and I hope they will tell my family some of the things I find hard to say face to face. When you girls bring me or my ashes up to Bo, I want you to remember what is contained in these pages, because it is for you. As the world goes around, so do human lives and the families that make them. And as my little life goes around, remember that you lot, you are what made me.

Zoltan Zinn-Collis
April 2006

Foreword

YOURE TWO MINUTES LATE, ZOLTAN DECLARED, tapping his watch and peering at me sceptically. I was surprised it was our first meeting after allbut I would soon learn to take his reproaches less seriously. A mordant pronouncement, I would discover, is his usual way of meeting strangers. This was simply par for the course.

On that occasion he was wearing a tasteful yet striking Winnie the Pooh tie. I remarked upon it, and he lifted his trouser leg to reveal a matching sock. My knickers, he informed me with a characteristic grin, are my own business.

For Zoltan, such excursions into childhood are common, and childhood is a recurring theme with him. He claims a real affinity with young people: when I met him he had just been to speak in a secondary schoolsomething he has done regularly since, 50 years after his liberation, he began to speak about his experiences in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He makes no bones about the fact that he relishes the opportunity to reclaim, albeit vicariously, some of the childhood experience that was so banefully wrenched from under his own feet. Hence the tie, socks andlegend has it the knickers.

But this relish in childhood is not an escape or a denial. Attached to the Winnie the Pooh tie he wears an anti-racism pina more subtle but equally powerful sign, which tells us that when Zoltan flirts with childhood he does not forget his adult concerns. He wears his Holocaust experience as a badge, and if it has caused him to find solace in other childhoods, it has also left him with a very adult sense of responsibility. In private he is a family man, and has deliberately protected his wife and children from his own emotional baggage; but in public Zoltan is a Holocaust survivora relentless ambassador for the forces that have kept him alive through one of the darkest hours of history. He is a man on a mission, determined to testify to what he has witnessed.

The distortion of his spine by the tuberculosis he contracted in Belsen has left him exceptionally short, and he is likely to become more so in the coming years. He now walks haltingly and with great effort and must keep to a strict and limited diet because of his diabetes. There is a good chance, too, that he will end his days totally paralysed from the waist down. (Typically, Zoltan will brook no expression of pity and greets any attempt at such with a conversation-stopping, Shit happens.)

But the psychological scars of his experience are scarcely less evident than the physical. He is so wary of human contact that he is never first to offer his hand for the shaking; he abhors busy pubs and restaurants; he carefully avoids letting himself be caught in a crowd. And more strikingly, he cultivates a distinctive brusqueness of manner. Zoltan has no time for the conventions of self-conscious politeness and will say what is on his mind no matter who is listening. This, to say the least, can be off-putting, but it allows Zoltan to maintain around himself an emotional exclusion zone. If you cannot come close enough, physically and emotionally, you cannot hurt him.

But there is more to Zoltans curt demeanour. As well as maintaining his own defences in social situations it allows him to penetrate those of other people, the inevitable protective husks of small talk and pretension. Despite his detachment, his humour is as incisive as a scalpel and can cut, without ceremony, to the bone. The persona he presents means that he can advance towards and retreat from human contact at willand that is crucial, since, essentially, the function of this persona is not protection, but control. Zoltan has been crushed among the dead and the dying in fetid cattle trucks and concentration camps, and thereby robbed brutally of any control of physical and mental contact with other people. He has had his space invaded in the most horrific fashion, with the effect that it is now of paramount importance for him to be in complete control of his own body and the space around itat all times, and at much cost.