Name Zoltan Collis | ||
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Final Witness
Zoltan Zinn-Collis (born 1940, in the High Tatras) was a Slovakian survivor of the Holocaust. He was one of only five living survivors of the Holocaust in Ireland. He died in his Athy home in Ireland on December 10 2012.
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Family
Zinn-Collis is the son of a Jewish labourer and a Hungarian Protestant woman. Collis had two sisters and one brother, the youngest sister being killed during the Holocaust at the age of 1 and a half. Zoltan's brother Aladar developed TB and died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. On April 15, 1945, Zoltan's mother died in Belsen. On the same day, the Red Cross had come to save them. His father, Adolf Zinn, was suspected to have died in Ravensbruck in 1944. His older sister, Edit, also survived the Holocaust and was brought to Ireland after the war.
Life in Ireland
The head of the Red Cross was Bob Collis, an Irish doctor. When Dr Collis first gathered Zoltan in his arms, the boy declared in German: "My father is dead. You are now my father." Bob Collis eventually adopted Zoltan and Edit and raised the two orphaned children in Ireland with the support of his wife Phyllis. Today Zoltan became a manager of some of Ireland's leading hotels. He married an Irish girl and they raised four daughters together.
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