File picture of a Nazi concentration camp

The writer recounts the story of singer Lotte Neville

Lotte Neville’s story is as heart-rending as it is awe-inspiring. And I listened to her with rapt attention on that cold February day in 1991 when I met her in a hotel in Delhi.

Lotte was then 85, but still beautiful and graceful, an extraordinary woman whose eyes said it all.

Lotte, a wonderful singer from a young age, found herself at the receiving end of Nazi atrocities as soon as Adolf Hitler’s reign started. Her family’s misfortunes started because of her father’s name, Adolf Sammer.

“There is only one Adolf and any other is a mockery,” Nazi hooligans shouted, as they attacked the family one day. It was the beginning.

When the Holocaust started, Lotte and her husband Felix, her mother Sybilla and her sister Edith and husband Hugo were taken to the infamous Auswitchz camp. Lotte was separated from the others in Auschwitz. She was tortured and raped before being rescued by the Allied soldiers.

In her own words, “My husband, mother, sister, brother-in-law and nearly every relative died a brutal death. Ill-clad and barefoot, I was forced to march through storm and snow from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen. When the British troops liberated this camp, I lay unconscious amidst a pile of bodies. Bulldozers were being used to push the bodies into mass graves until some kindly soldier saw that I was still breathing. I was rushed to the hospital.”

In a brutal account of her ordeal, she wrote:

“Cut off the breasts of womenfolk/and throw them/To the ravening dogs thrice/Eagerly to chew on them/Shaved off the heads of Jewish girls/And spat upon their black and auburn curls...”

Lotte migrated to the US where she picked up the threads of her life by becoming a singer in New York. There she met Herbert Neville, a magician, who, too, had lost his family in Prague, the capital of then Czechoslovakia. They were married soon after.

I had asked Lotte why she had not gone to Israel like most other Jews after the War. Her eyes turned moist as she replied, “Germany was my fatherland. It was a place where I was born. But there was no place for me there. So I did not feel like going anywhere but went to the US.”

There were so many questions I wanted to ask but was afraid that I might hurt her feelings.

But I could not resist asking one final question, “Had you met Hitler?” She was very poised, as she replied, “No, I had not. But I had seen his convoy pass through the road in front of our camp.”

There was no bitterness in her voice, no anger.

What I remember now is Lotte’s philosophy in life, “Be ever positive, never negative. The positive alone is divine.”

I am not surprised now that the worst Nazi brutality could not kill Lotte. (Concluded)