She was featured several times in the pages of this paper as a child survivor of the Holocaust.

Tamara Dietrich, in a 2018 Daily Press article, described Erika as a person who spent much of her childhood in hiding, in prison or on the run.

Born into World War II, Erika was 4 years old when her father was sent to a slave labor camp in Germany from Nazi allied Hungary, and she will never see him again.

Erika, her mother and sister Judith survived the Holocaust, using false birth certificates, pretending to be of Christian faith.

When the war was over, the Fabians lived under the iron fist of Stalinist communism. In 1952, when Erika was 12 years old, her mother told her and Judith, who was 15, they were going to escape to the West.

The idea was to cross the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria, a border that wasn’t mined. But within minutes after exiting Czechoslovakia, and entering no-man’s land, flares lit up the sky, Slovak border guards showed up with guns and German shepherd dogs.

Dietrich quoted Erika saying, “There were like 20 of us. They shot some people. We were lucky. … We were lying down in the snow because my mother said, ‘Don’t move, you will get shot.’ So, we were just simply picked up and taken to prison.”

Erika, because of her young age, was separated from her mother and sister and locked up what was called Detska Izba (Children’s Room), an Orwelian-name for a youth detention center.

Erika spent eight months there while her mother and sister were locked up in the Central Prison. There was no communication permitted among them.

Fortunately, Erika’s mother managed to smuggle out a note to me. I was living in Prague, serving as foreign correspondent for Hungarian newspapers. In the note, she was asking for help. Using my connections, I succeeded in gaining permission to take the two girls to Prague, and take care of them, until the Fabian family’s fate is decided.

After spending more than a year in Czechoslovak prison, the Hungarian Communist government extradited the family back to Budapest. By then, the ruthless Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was dead and the Hungarian government eased up on punishment for people trying to escape. After returning to Hungary, the Fabians were soon set free.

It wasn’t until the 1956 Hungarian uprising that the Fabian family was able to escape, first to Austria, and from there emigrate to the United States.

In America Erika thrived. When she arrived, she didn’t speak a word English. A year-and-a-half later, she graduated from high school with honors. She enrolled at Northwestern University and earned a bachelor’s degree in theater and a master’s in arts from UCLA. She became the director of the Actors Lab and School of Theater, later professor at the National University of Mexico.

In 1970, Erika switched careers to writing, photography and teaching She become the author of 25 published books, many illustrated with her photos from around the world. More than 200 of her photo-illustrated articles were published in prestigious magazines, including the National Geographic.

Erika has two sons. One is a world-renowned eye surgeon, the other an award-winning film maker. Both of her sons live in London.

Recently, Erika paid a visit to London, and decided to make a detour to Bratislava, Slovakia, where 71 years ago she spent eight months in prison.

“Throughout my life I had thought about that year as a very important time of growth toward maturity in my life,” Erika said in an interview with the Gazette. “Revisiting the city made it “real” for me. Yes, I’ve been here, yes it exist, and yes, I was able to go back and see it.”

Accompanied by Marketa, a Czech friend, Erika was searching for the building that housed the “Detska Izba,” her prison. It was demolished, together with the Central Prison where her mother and sister had been held. Apartment buildings stand there now.

During her visit, what Erika considered of utmost importance to her was to find the statue of the Virgin Mary on a pedestal, in a grotto, on the top of a small hill.

Her cellmate at the “Detska Izba” was a young Hungarian countess, who along with her parents, had also been captured while trying to escape from Communist Hungary.

The countess, and Erika, occasionally were allowed to go for a walk. The countess, deeply religious, wanted to pray at the statue. Each time, Erika accompanied her.

“The visit to the statue of the Virgin Mary, was the most emotional part of my trip to Bratislava,” Erika said. “I was sitting at a bench facing the statue and cried. The memories overwhelmed me.”

Erika’s memoir, her 26th book, “Liars’ Paradise,” is expected to be published early next year.

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(Frank Shatz is a former resident of Lake Placid and a current resident of Williamsburg, Virginia. He is the author of “Reports from a Distant Place,” a compilation of his columns. This column is used with permission by the Virginia Gazette.)