The Dancing Queen

Silent disco in the city

Mum has always been the Dancing Queen.

She told me that ever since she was a young girl, back in the 1920s, she loved to dance. Her father, a charmer, a good singer and dancer, would return home from an evening at a local tea room with a slice of creamy chocolate karpatka cake for her. Hearing him arrive, she would jump out of bed, and together they’d dance around the room.

And she has loved dancing ever since.

Then came the war. In 1939 everything changed. There was no more dancing, not for a long, long time.

Six years of hell. Then liberation, border crossings, displaced persons camps, permits. Then sailing to Australia in 1949 as refugees with their baby, adapting to a new country, three jobs, a new language. A new life.

And so the 1950s passed. And then came the 1960s and slowly they began to spread their wings.

Mum recounts:

Adolek and I loved bringing friends together with food and dance. We needed to express our joy at being alive; that we had survived. We all worked hard to build our lives here, but we also knew how to have fun. We had come from darkness, and we were ready to open our arms to life.

I had loved dancing ever since those nights with my father. Dancing made me feel euphoric, like I was soaring, free as a bird. I was lucky that Adolek was a very good dancer. He had learned the waltz, tango and foxtrot before the war. We were a good team and won first prize in several dancing competitions.

....xxx...

Mum and Dad began to host annual dress-up parties. The only rules: you had to dress up, and you had to dance.

Many of the guests rented extravagant costumes from Her Majesty’s Theatre in the city.

Even as a young girl, I was welcome, and felt very comfortable with their friends, dressing up and dancing with them.

Dad was in charge of the music. First, he selected songs from his record collection, carefully recording them onto large audio tapes. He filmed every party with his movie camera, later spending hours syncing the music to the footage.

At the time, technology couldn’t combine audio and visual automatically, so he did it himself. He spent hours and hours documenting and editing our lives on film.

we came from the ashes….AND NOW WE DANCE

The whole Party

This video is dedicated to my mother and father, Marysia and Adolek Kohn, and to their friends, who rose above their tragic past with a burning desire to dance and celebrate life.

When one of my projects, Dancing Auschwitz, stirred controversy, and some people questioned the appropriateness of the work, whether it was disrespectful, even shocking.

When asked about this, my father said:

The dancing was very important because today, we are alive. We survived. We were dancing to the song of survival. We also prayed for the dead at the camps before we danced.

And my mother’s words were even simpler:

We came from the ashes… AND NOW WE DANCE !

Snippets1. Mum and Dad

Snippets 2

Snippets 3

Snippets 4

and more recently...with Kamran

#DancingAuschwitz, #HolocaustSurvivors, #FromAshesToJoy, #SurvivorStories, #WeDance, #NeverForget, #LifeAfterTheHolocaust, #SecondGenerationVoices, #AuschwitzSurvivors, #MemoryAndResistance