Theatrical Performance During the Holocaust: Texts, Documents, Memoirs (review)

Theatrical Performance During the Holocaust: Texts, Documents, Memoirs. Edited by Rebecca Rovit and Alvin Goldfarb. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999; pp. 350. $42.50 cloth.

Were acts of cultural resistance like theatre, music, opera, and art under the circumstances experienced by the European Jews during the Second World War futile? And are we creating a sentimental image of the Holocaust by focusing on these activities? These are the two central issues raised by several of the authors (and in particular in the essay by Alvin Goldfarb, one of the editors) in this volume of articles, essays, documents, memoirs, letters, interviews, literary materials and a few photographs. The anthology presents an extensive and complex picture of the cultural, and in particular the theatrical, activities during the Nazi period. After reading this book the answer to both of these opening questions is: No.

The book begins with a section on theatrical activities in Germany during the six years of Nazi rule preceding the war. During this period Jews were ousted from their official positions in German theatres and were relegated to perform by and for themselves in the so-called Kulturbund theatre. In many cases they were also still able to flee the country, and those who remained were not yet the victims of mass exterminations. Rebecca Rovit, the other editor of this volume, has written extensively on this subject before, and she summarizes her research here as well as presenting interviews and various documents from the period. The main focus of the book, though, is theatrical activities during the time of the mass exterminations in the ghettos; in the transit camps; in the model camp of Terezin (Theresienstadt), to which representatives of the Red Cross were brought for inspections, at which times the camp was transformed into a performance in order to deceive them; and even in the concentration camps with their factories of death, like Auschwitz, where no visitors were allowed.

One of the most remarkable—and tragic—documents in the volume is a report written by Rabbi Erich Weiner, who was responsible for what was called "organized leisure time" in Terezin from February 1942 to February 1943. He enumerates and describes the cultural activities in the camp for each month, and as a summary for several of the months he repeats the bureaucratic formula, "otherwise this month was an unmistakable work month." This document offers a very painful testimony to the dedication of the artists working under these extreme circumstances.

The juxtaposition of the direct reports of the participants and the administrators of these cultural activities, the letters and the excerpts from memoirs, the interviews and the selection of texts that were sung and performed, and the scholarly articles (most of which have been published before) makes this an impressive book. It does not claim to exhaust the subject, but since the theatre activities are presented from a broad variety of perspectives and temporal distances, it both brings the reader very close to the events themselves and at the same time presents a scholarly assessment of these activities. The individuals who created this stunning body of art did not have our perspective. They were totally isolated from the rest of the world and did not really know, as we of course know today, where the trains leaving Terezin were heading. Zdenka Ehrlich-Fantlová modestly formulates this in her memoirs published in the 1990s: "I can see now that the testimonies of us—survivors—will possibly be of some value, if at least to clarify some of the gaps and misconceptions in understanding the real significance that the arts played in the process of survival in Terezin" (231). Reading these testimonies confirms how important they were.

Even as this combination of different materials is one of the strengths of the book it is also one of its weaknesses. There are numerous implicit cross-references that are not spelled out clearly enough by the editors. Two contributions (those by Curt Daniel and...