The Tin Ring: How I Cheated Death - Tapa blanda

Powerful, driving and memorable, The Tin Ring is both harrowing and enlightening, a must read. --Lifestyle Magazine ...a sweet, unforgettable memoir... deserves to be read for its unique story and for its shared message about the unrelentingly strong human spirit, of which Fantlova's lyric prose so clearly speaks. --Publishers Weekly ...occupies an outstanding place among the memoirs of Jews who were fighting for their naked lives... and goes into the changes of a human psyche in contact with death... Her writing is far removed from any sentimentality... she was inspired by an indestructible will to live through faith and endeavouring to remain a human being. --Petr Kucera, Prague Zeitung

A peaceful childhood in pre-war Czechoslovakia seemed on course for a happy ending with her soul-mate Arno: but Hitler and war intervened. Arno perished in the Holocaust, but Zdenka carried his ring from Terezin to Auschwitz to Kurzbach, on a 300-mile death march to Gross Rosen and finally to Belsen. There, in the last chaotic days of the war, she almost died of starvation, but was saved by a British army officer, whose name she never learnt, and to whom her book The Tin Ring is dedicated.