Helen Lewis Administration Member of the Order of the British Empire was a pioneer of modern dance in Northern Ireland, and made her name as a dance teacher and choreographer.
Background
She was born in Trutnov in Bohemia and was a survivor of the Holocaust. Helena Katz was born in 1916 into a German-speaking Jewish family in Trutnov in Bohemia (later in Czechoslovakia, now in the Czechoslovakian 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.
Education
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 Herrmann, a Czechoslovakian from a Jewish family, and in 1938, after she had finished her dance training and her university exams, they were married.
Career
She taught as an assistant at Mayerová"s dance school, and experimented with choreography. Following the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, deportations of Jewish families began in August 1941. The Herrmanns were sent in 1942 to Terezín.
In 1944 they were transferred to Auschwitz and separated.
Paul Herrmann died in 1945 on a forced march, not long before the end of the Second World War. Helen, who survived two "selections" by Doctor Josef Mengele, was later sent to Stutthof 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 died at Sobibór extermination camp.
Helen began to correspond with Harry Lewis, a Czechoslovakian with British nationality whom she had known at school and with whom she had had a brief romance before she met Herrmann.
In 1956 she did the choreography for a production of The Bartered Bride of Smetana at Grosvenor High School in, for a performance of Dvořák"s The Golden Spinning Wheel at the Ballet Club, and for a Macbeth at the Lyric Theatre, Lewis also taught modern dance, and in 1962 started the Modern Dance Group. In 2001 she was awarded an Administration Member of the Order of the British Empire for her services to contemporary dance. Her book A Time to Speak, about her experiences before and during the War, was published in 1992 and was translated into several other languages.
lieutenant was adapted for the theatre by Sam McCready and performed at the Lyric Theatre during the Festival in 2009.
She died on 31 December 2009, aged 93.