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Dance teacher and Holocaust survivor honoured in adopted home city of Belfast

Dance teacher and Holocaust survivor Helen Lewis was honoured by a blue plaque at a Belfast's Crescent Arts Centre in south Belfast. Picture by Mal McCann.
Dance teacher and Holocaust survivor Helen Lewis was honoured by a blue plaque at a Belfast's Crescent Arts Centre in south Belfast. Picture by Mal McCann. Dance teacher and Holocaust survivor Helen Lewis was honoured by a blue plaque at a Belfast's Crescent Arts Centre in south Belfast. Picture by Mal McCann.

FROM the hell of Auschwitz to the dance halls of Belfast, the remarkable life of a Czech-Jewish dancer has been celebrated in her adopted home city.

Surviving the Holocaust and moving to Belfast where she fell in love with a Czech childhood friend, Helen Lewis helped to bring modern dance to the fore in Northern Ireland.

A dancer, choreographer and writer - her name is synonymous in the creative arts industry in the north.

Her contribution was honoured on Friday with the unveiling of a blue plaque in her name, with the event taking place on Holocaust Memorial Day.

Ms Lewis' two sons Robin and Michael joined Rabbi David Singer and Belfast Lord Mayor Brian Kingston at the unveiling at the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast, where poetry, music and dance celebrated her life.

Born Helena Katz in Trutnov, Czechoslovakia in 1916, she studied dance in Prague. She married her first husband in 1938, but they were deported to the Jewish ghetto of Terezin in 1942.

The couple were then transferred to Auschwitz, but were separated. After the Liberation, she returned to Prague to discover that her husband had not survived.

In October 1945, an old Czech friend Harry Lewis contacted her from his new home in Belfast, to where he had escaped just before the war, to work in the linen industry.

They married in Prague in 1947 and returned to Belfast to make a new life and start a family.

After the birth of their two sons, Ms Lewis re-kindled her love of dance and began a busy and productive career choreographing for theatre and opera.

She is known for having created the first modern dance work in Northern Ireland for the Belfast Ballet Club in 1956 and subsequently founded the Belfast Modern Dance Group, whose first performance was in 1962.

Ms Lewis, who died in 2009 aged 93, wrote movingly of her experiences during her early life in Auschwitz in her 1992 memoir, A Time to Speak. Her extraordinary gifts as a teacher are remembered by generations of dancers who continue to teach her work throughout the world.

The blue plaque was unveiled on Holocaust Memorial Day, which remembers the millions of people murdered in the Holocaust under Nazi persecution during World War Two, as well as those killed in other genocides.

Chris Spurr, chairman of the Ulster History Circle, said they were "delighted to honour this exceptional person, whose life and work is an inspiration to all".

"It is fitting that the plaque to Helen Lewis is at the Crescent Arts Centre, where she taught dance for many years," she said.