Zoltan Zinn-Collis

Zoltan Zinn-Collis was born in the High Tatra Mountains of Slovakia, the son of a Jewish laborer and a Hungarian Protestant woman. He was only a small child when Nazi Germany invaded his homeland in World War II. Because she was a Christian, Zoltan’s mother did not have to go when the family was deported in 1944, but she would not leave them, and went with them to Ravensbrϋck concentration camp and then to Bergen-Belsen. Both parents and all but one of Zoltan's siblings perished. He was found alive at the liberation of the camp in 1945, along with his older sister Edit, by Dr. William Robert "Bob" Fitzgerald Collis, an Irish physician. Dr. Bob Collis brought five survivor children back to Ireland after the war and adopted Zoltan and Edit. Zoltan became a manager of some of Ireland's leading hotels. He married an Irish woman with whom he had four daughters. His memoir, Final Witness: My Journey from the Holocaust to Ireland, was published in 2006. In his later years, Zoltan toured the country giving lectures on the Holocaust to schools and history groups.