The following is a synopsis of Lydia Tischler’s book which recounts her life before, during and after the Holocaust.
Lydia Tischler was born on 1 January 1929 in Ostrava in what was then Czechoslovakia. She lived with her sister Rutka, her signwriter father Sigmund Folkart and her creative mother Elisabeth, who could sew, knit and crochet and was a stickler for cleanliness. Her story takes her from childhood innocence to the horrors of the ghetto-camp of Theresienstadt where she spent two years before volunteering to go to Auschwitz after learning that her mother and sister were being transported there.
Tragically, Lydia’s mother was murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Lydia and her sister Rutka were sent to the labour camp of Oederan in Germany where they dug trenches and held onto their integrity – just.
After liberation in 1945, Lydia came to England in a Wellington bomber aircraft as one of The Windermere Boys, staying in the Lake District for a week before her father arrived and brought her to London. Lydia spent many years after the war maintaining a fantasy that her mother might still be alive and it was only through her own analysis, which was mandatory for her to train as a child psychotherapist, that she finally processed her mother’s death and let the idea go.
Lydia has gone onto to live a fulfilled, meaningful life, working as a child psychotherapist for over 65 years and marrying Salo Tischler in November 1975, who sadly died three years after their wedding, and inheriting a ready-made family.
