IN THIS TERRIBLE TIME LET US REMEMBER THE RESILIENCE OF THOSE WHO OVERCAME EVEN WORSE TRAGEDIES -- 75 YEARS AGO, APRIL 15, 1945.

By Frank Vogl, Executive Producer of the film – ZUZANA - MUSIC IS LIFE

 April 15, 2020.

My cousin Zuzana remarked that “If Auschwitz was hell, Bergen-Belsen was the nether hell – this was the lowest part of hell.”

 It was 75 years ago, on April 15, 1945, that British troops entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and saved the few thousand people who lived among the unburied corpses of many, many thousands more. An accompanying war correspondent Richard Dimbleby, we became the most trusted British journalist of his generation, reported that day on BBC radio - “I found myself in the world of a nightmare.” He added, “This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.”

 This was the only concentration camp that the British liberated and they arrived in the nick of time to save the lives of many of the inmates, all of whom were starving and most of whom had typhoid and other diseases. Zuzana recalled: “You know, the English were wonderful. The organization! This was a fighting army with only a few doctors and nurses, but everyone helped, with a lot of soldiers volunteering as male nurses. Everyone was so efficient. They got things organized so quickly in a place where there were thousands of ill people and thousands of dead bodies lying around.”

Zuzana Ruzickova died at the age of 90 in 2017. She was born in Czechoslovakia, survived Terezin, Auschwitz, slave labour in Hamburg and weighed just 60 pounds when English soldiers found her in Bergen-Belsen. She was to return to Czechoslovakia and face 40 years of anti-Semitism from a communist regime whose party she refused to join. Her amazing talent and determination enabled her to become one of the world’s leading harpsichordists for more than 50 years – three years ago, for example, Warner Music re-released her recordings of all of J.S. Bach’s keyboard works.

 In the three years before Zuzana died, friends of mine and I interviewed her many times for a documentary film that we made that has now been shown widely around the world where she talked about Bergen-Belsen and its liberation. Her story is beautifully captured in a memoir written together with British author Wendy Holden, “One Hundred Miracles – A Memoir of Music and Survival,” (Bloomsbury).

I remember so well sitting with her as she said that in Bergen-Belsen, “Nobody wanted us to survive. The weak and ill prisoners were not supposed to survive. But we did somehow…There were masses of dead bodies lying around. It was evening when we heard some trucks and some tanks arriving and it was the English. I stopped a truck and said, “Could you get some help for my mother?” because the whole camp was infected with typhoid and typhus and other plagues.”

Zuzana continued, “My mother was very ill. I was also sick but not as badly. We were all begging for food. The British took my mother to a hospital and she recovered very slowly. The English got me some clothes and when I was a bit better, I acted as an interpreter. One evening they gave me a large meal and they took me to a tent to see a movie. It was the first time I saw a film in color. “First, they played ‘God Save the King’ – I will never forget that. Later, I went back to my barracks and I was very sick. I was sick all night and I thought I might die. But I was also so happy – we were free.”

 Zuzana said that the kindness and consideration of the British soldiers who ended the Belsen horror and tended to the sick was unforgettable and on one visit to the UK to give a concert she managed to meet one of those soldiers again. She particularly enjoyed coming to the UK, she often performed in London’s Wigmore Hall and it was there that the movie we made together – “Zuzana: Music Is Life” - about her life, which includes archival footage from the camp, was to be shown in mid-March – sadly the Wigmore Hall like all UK theatrical venues was closed because of the Coronavirus the day before the screening.

 The story of the British liberation of Bergen-Belsen is one of British valour and resolve, and Zuzana’s story is one that encourages us all, at this stressful time of virus lock-down, to recall far worse horrors in the past and the human strengths of resilience to overcome.

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