A Note on the Authors
Zuzana Rikov was a celebrated Czech harpsichordist and a survivor of three Nazi concentration and slave labour camps. She recorded over one hundred albums, performed across the world to great acclaim, and became an influential teacher at the Prague Academy. Zuzana died in Prague in 2017 aged ninety.
Wendy Holden is the author of more than thirty published titles, many of them about the lives of remarkable women. A journalist and former war correspondent, she wrote Born Survivors , about three mothers and their babies who survived the Holocaust. She lives in Suffolk, England.
Dedicated by Zuzana to Johann Sebastian Bach, whose music reminds us that there is still beauty in this world
Contents
The process of writing this memoir was an unusual and often challenging one. In the years since the Second World War, Zuzana had almost never refused a request for an interview. She gave them in person, on the telephone, via video, in documentaries, on television and radio programmes, all in several different languages chiefly Czech, German, French, and English.
When I was invited to bring all these transcripts together and write her memoirs, I travelled to Prague in September 2017 for my own interviews, which were conducted at her home two weeks before she died. Zuzana was tiny, like a bird, with smoky grey eyes and a warm, open face. When she smiled, her eyes twinkled with mischief and joy. A heavy smoker, she lit one cigarette after the other as we sat for hours in her old-fashioned apartment or in a local restaurant, where she always ate a surprisingly generous quantity of food. Although at ninety years old she was tired, she was determined to answer my pages and pages of questions based on the existing material and my own extensive research. If she couldnt remember precise details such as dates and names, she would pour us a drink and ask me to fill them in for her. As we came to the end of our time together, she clasped my hand and asked me if I had everything I needed. I told her that I did, for now, but would see her again in a few months. She smiled and kissed me goodbye. Sadly that was the last time we were to meet.
After her unexpected death a week later everyone involved wanted to know if I had enough to proceed. My agent and our various international publishers were understandably concerned and her family and friends hopeful that the project could still go ahead. After reviewing all the material, I was delighted to tell them that it could. Zuzanas English was almost flawless and her remarkable story as set out in this book is told in her own words, transcribed from the answers she gave me and from those she gave to others who came before me, spanning many decades. These accounts were often almost identical, word for word, after years of telling the same stories over and over. Sometimes, however, they were conflicted, as can happen with memories of events long past. Occasionally, as she grew older, she was a little more forgetful. In a few of her interviews she claimed that she couldnt remember an event, whereas in others she was able to describe it with remarkable clarity. In the few instances where there was a discrepancy, I have drawn on her most coherent interviews and further corroborated the precise sequence of events using her personal letters, essays, and speeches as well as articles, archive material, a brief diary of her time in Auschwitz, and other historical documents. I have also relied on the testimonies of several people who shared her experiences during the war and afterwards, who were able to clarify certain points I could not otherwise accurately describe.
It was a considerable undertaking to weave all the material together, much of which had to be translated from the original. I have been enormously helped by the generosity of her previous interviewers and the patience of historians, archivists, documentarians, friends, family, translators, and musicians around the world. The recollections in this book are just as Zuzana remembered them. To the best of my ability, I have pieced them together in a way that I hope she would approve of.
My overriding impression was that Zuzana was determined to bear witness to history. Not just of the war years, but of the decades afterwards, which were often extremely challenging. I will be forever humbled by her courage and resilience in the face of so much suffering, prejudice, and adversity.
In spite of all that she endured, she remained a life-enhancing spirit who wished the world to know that shed been healed by music and the love of her mother and husband. It has been one of the greatest privileges of my life to fulfil that wish.
Wendy Holden
London, 2018
Welcome, Comrade! The cultural director greeted me as warmly as ever in the remote Transylvanian city of Sibiu. A million thanks for coming back. We cant wait to hear you play for us again.
It was the winter of 1960, and it had taken me the best part of a day to travel there from Kiev. When I eventually arrived alone, via a flight to Bucharest and then an ancient steam train that seemed to take forever to snake across the country, I was tired and extremely hungry.
My latest three-week recital tour of factories, shipyards, schools, colleges, and state buildings the tenth that year had been especially gruelling in the bitter cold of Ukraine, the Soviet Union, and Poland. Kiev had been particularly challenging, with an odd director whod threatened not to pay me. I was desperate to go home to my family in Prague after this, my penultimate concert for the authorities that year.
I knew from previous visits to medieval Sibiu that my accommodation and my long-awaited supper would be basic. Fortunately, I had a little salami and a spare tin of sardines left in my suitcase, as well as a supply of Russian cigarettes.
Of all the other Eastern bloc countries I was obliged to perform in under the socialists, Romania was one of the hardest hit by dreadful poverty and a pervading sense of despair. The people of this former Hungarian province had suffered terribly at the hands of President Gheorghiu-Dej and his senior minister Nicolae Ceauescu, and were even more starved of contact with the outside world than we Czechs. I remember one trip to Timioara where the hotel was so terrible, with such an insanely dirty bathtub, that I was afraid there would be bedbugs. I unpacked my little suitcase that my dear mum had packed so carefully for me and I started crying over it. I said to myself: if only my mum could see what kind of environment I was unpacking that little case in.
In Sibiu conditions were much the same, yet the musical director who was thrilled by the arrival of any artist under the state cultural programme somehow managed to lift my spirits every time, so grateful was he that Id once again agreed to include his city in my itinerary.
Everything is ready for you in your quarters, he assured me, words that had gladdened my heart on my first visit there a few years earlier until I saw my unheated room. With a blizzard predicted that bitter November night, Id probably be sleeping in my coat.
My recital of early music the following evening would be in the hall of a building that doubled as a cinema. Accompanied by Sibius enthusiastic musicians, I didnt expect it to be my most memorable performance, but I knew that the appreciation would be genuine and heartfelt.
Long before I pulled on the green velvet ball gown that my mother had had her seamstress make for me, however, I was paraded around town as usual, having my photograph taken with Communist Party officials at the administrative headquarters before visiting workplaces and schools. The pupils were always most receptive, especially if they had musical ambitions, and seemed to regard me as a kind of celebrity.
