Anita Spitzova

On 14 November 2012 our local High School was visited by a holocaust survivor. Hearing about this, made me think (again) of a promise I made during a visit to the Israel over twenty years ago.

I had timed my participation in an archaeological dig in Israel to perfection! As I awoke early on 2 August 1990 to catch an El Al flight to Tel Aviv, so the news bulletins were full of the announcement that the Iraqi Army had walked into the neighbouring Gulf State of Kuwait.

Israel bristled with weapons - on the trains, on the buses and in taxis. Taking a seat on a bus next to a good looking khaki clad young girl, I asked:

" Could you please move your assault rifle?"

She was most apologetic!



I found Israel a place of huge contradictions and contrast.. The beaches of Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Caesarea and Dor were wonderful, yet the patrol boats off-shore gave warning of potential menace. Affluent modern Jewish suburbs and ramshackle Arabic homes amidst ancient architecture. The grace and good manners of the Bedouin camp in the Sinai where our group shared coffee and the criminality and anger of a dodgy hotel behind the seafront in Tel Aviv, where I was robbed in my sleep.

The visit to Israel was also very emotional. One weekend I made the bus journey from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem where I visited Yad Vashem. (https://www.yadvashem.org/)

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"And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name (a "yad vashem")... that shall not be cut off."

(Isaiah, chapter 56, verse 5)

As the Jewish people’s living memorial to the Holocaust, Yad Vashem safeguards the memory of the past and imparts its meaning for future generations. Established in 1953, as the world centre for documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem is today a dynamic and vital place of intergenerational and international encounter.

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In many places it was a tearful visit, the silence and reverence of the place was overpowering and brought home the enormity of the Holocaust with painful force and the overwhelming need to try and understand "Why?"

In one of the galleries there was an exhibition of art work produce under the tutelage of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis in the Terezin/Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, in what is now the Czech Republic. This camp was the "showpiece ghetto" to show the world how "well" the Nazis were treating the Jews. 

Most of the work on display had been produced by children. I struggled to think of a way in which I could commemorate, in my own small way, these innocent youngsters who would see such terrible things before their almost inevitable death. I was looking at a picture drawn by Anita Spitzova. "Dance on a Meadow".

I promised Anita I would never forget her name.

A drawing by Anita Spitzova entitled "Dance on a Meadow".

Anita,10, won a contest in the Terezin  Ghetto with this drawing

and died in Auschwitz the next year.

Anita Spitzova

"Anita Spitzova was born in 1933. During the war she was deported with Transport L from Praha,Praha Hlavni Mesto,Bohemia,Czechoslovakia to Theresienstadt Ghetto,Czechoslovakia on 10 December 1941. Deported with transport En from Theresienstadt,Ghetto,Czechoslovakia to Auschwitz Birkenau,Camp on 04/10/1944. Anita was murdered in the Shoah."

The following weekend I visited Jerusalem again, this time wandering through the ancient alleys of the Arabic quarter. Many of the shops and stalls were closed because of the Intifada.

On returning to the hotel in Tel Aviv that night, I was having the ritual beer in the bar, and discussing my adventures with the young bar keeper. As I left to get something to eat, he commented,

"The only good Arab is a dead Arab, you know!"

Sadly I said nothing - I was a guest in this land - but I immediately thought that some lessons are not easily learnt. 

I remembered Anita Spitzova.