From The Times

July 15, 2008
Hana Pravda

The Czech actress Hana Pravda was a survivor of both the Theresienstadt and Auschwitz concentration camps. She was a leading light in Prague theatre and later, from the 1960s, enjoyed a successful career in British television and films. Then, when she might have expected to move into quiet retirement, her moving wartime diary of her escape from a Nazi death march was rediscovered. Published in Czech and in English as I Was Writing This Diary for You, Sasha, it was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in 2000, and was recognised as one of the most vivid memoirs of the Holocaust.

She was born Hana Beckova in Prague, then a city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1916 during the First World War. Her father, Joseph Beck, was one of the Czech Legionnaires who went abroad to fight against Austria-Hungary and for the creation of an independent Czechoslovak state, which was achieved as the war ended in 1918. Her father then took up a career as a banker, and she enjoyed an enchanted childhood, spending many of her summer holidays in Paris with her mother to whom she was devoted. But in June 1932 her mother died of leukaemia.

To help her to overcome her grief, Hana’s father sent her for drama lessons with the famous Czech actress Olga Scheinpflugova. She began to act professionally and made 19 films as a juvenile. In 1936 she went to Leningrad to study acting under the Russian director Alexei Dikii. Living a relatively prosperous life in well-subsidised theatres, she little realised the horrors happening in Stalinist Russia around her: “I was politically utterly stupid,” she later confessed.

She returned to a Prague where the optimism of the early Czechoslovak state was rapidly fading under the looming shadow of Nazi Germany. Soon after the German occupation of the Czech lands in March 1939, she married Alexander “Sasha” Munk, a student activist she had first met in 1936 and with whom she had fallen in love. Around the same time she had discovered that, although her family had not been religiously observant, as far as the Nazis were concerned she would be classified as Jewish. She and Sasha were married and moved to what they hoped was the safe haven of Potstejn, a small town in eastern Bohemia. But they were later deported to the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp. Many thousands were crammed into this old fortress, many died from starvation and disease as well as the cruelty of their captors. Despite all this, the camp was at first famous for its cultural life. Hana joined the Freigeist theatre group, which performed Goethe and Gogol in attics and basements. “We had so little to eat, we were freezing all the time, but the sheer joy of being able to act . . . fed our souls,” she recalled.

Then, at the end of 1944, her husband’s name appeared on a list for deportation to Auschwitz, and she begged to be allowed to go with him. They did not know what Auschwitz meant, and were separated on arrival, trying to keep in contact by whistling a favourite piece from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Healthy enough for work, she was not sent to the gas chambers but to a work camp 250 miles away. In minus-zero temperatures the women had to dig a huge trench across the Polish steppe. “It was about three metres deep with water at the bottom,” she said. “Our SS men thought it highly amusing to push us into the water as we dug.”

As the war came to an end the camp was abandoned and in January 1945, in deep snow, the Nazis forced its 900 occupants westwards in what amounted to a “death march”, murdering those unable to keep up. She recorded it all in a diary she began after finding a notebook in an abandoned house, the days endured, as she put it, “stumbling, ragged and shoe-less, through ice-filled ditches, cowering from the raining blows of a rifle butt”.

She managed to escape the march with a friend. But the diary later recorded her suicidal horror when she discovered that her husband had died just a few days before the end of the war. “I was writing this diary for you, Sasha. For you I could endure the hunger and cold. For you I could reach the end of the road. I didn’t want to die. But without you my life is meaningless. I know I will die, and I hope it will be soon.”

Her suicide attempt failed, however, and eventually she resumed her theatrical career. In 1946 she married the actor, Jiri (George) Pravda, and they had a son. However, life in Prague became unbearable as the Communists took power and fear entered the theatre as everywhere else: “Having survived one dictatorship” she “smelled another one coming”. In 1948 they escaped to Paris and then to Australia, where they set up their own English-speaking theatre company which they called Tana, the Aborigine word for happiness.

In 1955 they were spotted by Dame Sybil Thorndike, who was on tour in Australia. Impressed by the couple’s standard of acting she encouraged them to come to London and gave them letters of introduction to Sir John Gielgud and Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont of H. M. Tennant, then London’s most powerful theatre producer.

George Pravda subsequently worked in the West End and did seasons at the Old Vic theatre with Laurence Olivier. Hana began to make a name for herself as a character actress on television appearing in series such as The Wednesday Play, The Men From Room 13, Dangerman and others. Later she had starring roles in The Survivors and Tales of the Unexpected and her film credits included The Kremlin Letter, Before Winter Comes and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She also directed many plays at the Thorndike Theatre, Leatherhead. George Pravda died in 1985, at the age of 68.

On Christmas Eve 1995 a parcel arrived at her London flat. It contained her wartime diary, barely legible, in its flimsy red notebook, and a photograph of Sasha. She had had to leave it behind in Prague in 1948. Attempts had been made to send it on, but it had been mislaid and forgotten for decades until a friend who had emigrated to Australia rediscovered it. After hesitating for fear of reviving old wounds she sent it on to Pravda, who initially “scrabbled on my hands and knees, reading snatches — I wanted to devour it”.

In 2000 it was published to worldwide acclaim in Britain. The original is now in the keeping of the Imperial War Museum.

Conscious that the eyewitnesses were dying out, and the Holocaust deniers were active, she reflected that: “Whatever you went through, it’s good to put it down on paper.” She added: “We should not forget how so-called civilised European people who think themselves cultured can organise murder and with relish carry it out.”

Pravda is survived by her son, Alex, a lecturer in Russian and East European politics at the University of Oxford.

Hana Pravda, actress and Holocaust survivor, was born on January 29, 1916. She died on May 22, 2008, aged 92