Jane Arnfield is to perform stage show The Tin Ring in Terezin where its subject, Zdenka Fantlova, was held by the Nazis
The Tin Ring is a story that has moved many to tears and it is likely to do so again this week in the Czech Republic.
Jane Arnfield, actress and arts academic at Northumbria University, is to stage her one-woman play about Holocaust survivor Zdenka Fantlova in Terezín, the Czech town where thousands died in a concentration camp (called Theresienstadt by the Germans) during the Second World War.
Zdenka, a Jew from former Czechoslovakia, grew up with a love of music, learning to play the piano and being taken to concerts and the theatre.
In 1942, aged 18, she was transported to Terezín where her boyfriend, Arno, gave her the tin ring that would, many years later, provide the title for her moving memoir.
In The Tin Ring she relates matter-of-factly the horrors she had to endure – in Terezín, Auschwitz and finally Bergen-Belsen.
Many times she came close to death but she survived the war, being plucked to safety from among the dead and dying by an unknown British solider after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. She never saw Arno again.
Jane Arnfield, reader in arts at Northumbria, adapted The Tin Ring into a stage show with the help of director Mike Alfreds.
Since its 2012 premiere, it has been performed to acclaim around the world, including at Newcastle’s Lit & Phil, where Zdenka was in the audiuence and afterwards signed copies of her book.
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מוזיק אין חורבן | Music in the Holocaust 