Theatrical Activities in Nazi Concentration Camps

Theatrical Activities in Nazi Concentration Camps Alvin Goldfarb To understand the phenomenon of theatre in Nazi concentration camps, one must first have a minimal awareness of the creation of the Konzentrationslager(KL). The earliest camps were used for the imprisonment of persons arrested under Hitler's "Protective custody" laws. Under these ordinances habitual criminals, homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, and asocials were interned. In 1938, after the Kristalnachtpogroms, 35,000 Jews were placed in the KLs. Dachau, established by Himmler on March 26, 1933, became the standard camp on which later internment centers were modeled and in which future personnel were trained. Other notorious pre-war camps were Buchenwald, Ravensbruck, and Sachsenhausen. The beginning of World War It marked a new stage in the development of Nazi concentration camps. During the war the number of camps and prisoners, both within the Old Reich and the newly conquered territories, reached gigantic proportions, with the inmates being predominantly foreign nationals, among whom were a high percentage of Jews. New types of subsidiary camps were established. Numerous transit camps arose, most of which were short-lived; essentially, these camps were way stations for the larger internment centers. Among them were Malines in Belgium, Vittel in France, and Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. With the outbreak of World War II, labor camps, where prisoners were exploited by war-related industries, were also founded. Examples of such institutions were Czestochowa in Poland and Kaiserwald near Riga 3 in Latvia. The infamous camps, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, and Majdanek, were extermination centers for Jews and other Untermenschen. Only Auschwitz, which was a complex of three major camps, served both as an industrial and extermination center. To offset rumors of atrocities, the Nazis also established "model camps." The most famous of these was Theresienstadt which was inspected by the Red Cross and representatives of the King of Denmark. The horrors of the Nazi concentration camps are too well-known to us. We the living have indelibly stamped in our minds images of shaven, sickly concentrationaires who were treated inhumanely, their humanity egregiously insulted, barely subsisting on stale bread and soups in the poorest of sanitary conditions, physically abused as specimens for Nazi medical experiments, and driven, from morning to night, to complete torturous work details. Yet, as awesome as it may seem, in this man-made hell which most men knew they would not survive, a limited amount of leisure time was filled with games and cultural activities, not the least of which were theatrical. The SS encouraged sports for the healthy and still strong. There were soccer games, handball, volley ball, and even boxing matches. In the older camps, radio music was piped into the barracks over public address systems. In May 1941, the Buchenwald SS equipped a hall usually employed for public hangings as a motion picture theatre: old, discarded films were shown at irregular intervals. In 1942, a brothel, restricted to Aryan prisoners, was established in Mauthausen; in 1943, brothels were opened in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. In some camps secret libraries were established, containing books received from home or discovered by "Canada," the labor detachment which sorted the belongings of the liquidated . Obviously then, the desire for culture and entertainment was never extinguished. Nor was the desire to perform. The most common theatrical activity in Nazi concentration camps was the presentation of clandestine programs of songs and readings in the individual barracks. In Buna-Monowitz (Auschwitz III), the largest of Auschwitz's thirty-nine outside labor detachments, set up in 1942 in the vicinity of the Buna factory, a group of Jewish cultural leaders, including the author Joseph Wolf. the actor Moishe Potashinski, and the Dutch, Yiddish and Hebrew scholar Itzhak Goldman organized such entertainments . In his memoirs, Potashinski, a former member of the renowned Yiddish Vilna Troupe, describes a typical presentation. The audience sat on their bunks; the performers recited fragments fom Sholom Aleichem's Tevve the Milkman, Chaim Grade's The Cry of Generations, and Moishe Kolbak's The Bells Have Rung, while also singing Itzik Manger's "The Song of Our Teacher" and Mordecai Gebirtig's "Our Town is Burning," a song commemorating a 1938 Polish pogrom in Przytyk. A similar production , staged...