From the Holocaust Centre of NZ newsletter…
As a result of her decades-long research that underpinned the publication of her book, ‘The Burned Letter, A New Zealander’s Holocaust Mystery’, the City Council of Volyně conferred on Helene Ritchie honorary citizenship of their town in Strakonice District in the South Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic.
On 25 May 2025, Helene Ritchie was the guest of honour at a ceremony for the Fantl House memorial plaque, which she created. She unveiled the plaque on the discovered renaissance Fantl house, which is now Volyňka school, in Volyně, in a protected urban monument town with a 15th-century town hall one door away. Helene says, “I accepted this honorary citizenship for family past and present”.
Helene’s grandfather, Robert Fantl, and his brothers and sisters were born and lived in Volyně.
Helene first discovered in the 1960s that her family had lived in Czechoslovakia. She found the grave of her grandfather Robert Fantl, who died in 1923. In 2012 she given a picture of Lidi and Bobby which had been thrown out of the Fantl house by the Nazis and recovered.
Helene’s grandfather and all his brothers and sisters lived as children in the Fantl house of their parents, David Fantl and Phillpine (Fürth).
Helene’s uncle Robert “Bob” Fantl z”l, who passed away in 2016, was the last known survivor of the 669 children rescued by Sir Nicholas Winton’s Kindertransport. Bob Fantl was 15 when he travelled from Czechoslovakia to the Netherlands and on to England. From England, he travelled to New Zealand in 1950, where he was reunited with his mother and sister, and settled in Wellington. Bob Fantl was an influential modernist architect who worked in partnership with Austrian architect Ernst Plischke before founding his own firm.
