Maya’s Dance is a work of fiction, but it is inspired by the experiences of Holocaust survivor Lucie Pollak-Langford.

I first heard Lucie’s story while I was waiting for my daughter’s ballet lesson to finish. One of the other mothers, Sonja, was visiting an elderly couple whom she had befriended years earlier, and she was worried that Lucie was showing early signs of dementia. 

Sonja is a dance physiotherapist who met Lucie as a client. Over the years they had become extremely close friends – they had embraced each other’s families, and Sonja had even become the legal guardian of Lucie and her husband, Peter. 

‘Lucie was in a labour camp during the Holocaust,’ Sonja told me, as the strains of our daughters’ ballet music wafted from the studio. ‘One of the guards saw her dance and fell in love with her, and he got her out.’

From that moment, I have been consumed with Lucie’s story. I accessed her documented experiences from her self-published memoir (available on Amazon) and from several hours of oral testimony recorded in the nineties as part of Stephen Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation project. I have conducted extensive research, including from numerous survivor testimonies, interviews, and a trip to Sawin and Sobibór in Poland.

The fundamentals of Lucie’s story are the same as Maya’s. She grew up in Brno, Czech Republic, and was transported to a labour camp in Sawin via Terezín at age fifteen. She danced in the camp and a Polish engineer, Jan Hensel, fell in love with her. Her mother, Irene, and stepfather, Felix, both perished before Jan helped Lucie to escape, hiding her under a bakery and then in his parents’ apartment in Chelm. She then lived for two years undercover in Germany. Lucie was Sawin’s only survivor.

Lucie searched for Jan throughout her life, but by the time she located his family he had passed away. At her instigation, Jan, his sister, Danuta, and his mother, Eufrozyna, are formally recognised as Righteous Among the Nations for their bravery. 

Much of Maya’s Dance is invented for dramatic effect, but I have tried to stay true to the essence of Lucie’s story. She was firm that she could not spend her life hating Germans and, in fact, many of those she met during the War were good people. She never lost her strong will to survive, to pull through. She lived for the moment. She loved life.

Due to the pandemic, I only got to meet Lucie once, in a residential facility near my home in northern Sydney. By then her dementia had advanced too far to hold a conversation, but she held my hand and squeezed it rhythmically as we spoke. I felt that she radiated calm and light. 

Lucie died in 2021 with Peter and Sonja by her side. Like many Holocaust survivors, she wanted her story to be told. While not her story, I hope that Maya’s Dance does justice to her message.