The Theatre of the Holocaust, Volume 2: Six Plays

CAMP COMEDY

Roy KiftzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWV CAMP COMEDY Songs and Sketches by Leo Strauss (1897-1944) and Manfred Greiffenhagen (1896-1944) For Nelly and Mia ON zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA A staged moment fromzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPON The Fiihrer Gives a City to the Jews (Der Fiihrer sch by Kurt Gerron in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, 1944. Photog National Center for Jewish Film, Brandeis Univ In Theresienstadt.. . almost anything could be repressed . . . illusion ran rampant and hope, merely dampened by anxiety suffused everything . . . There was no place in Western Europe... where camp inmates were more removed from reality than here. —H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt: 1941-1945 Nothing was compatible with normal common sense. Everything was organised through and through to satisfy hatred, crime and the lust to kill. Uncertainty and fear were the mental whip and might of the chosen specimens of the "Herrenvolk." —Karel Ancerl. Chief conductor, Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and inmate in Theresienstadt, 1942-1944. The ashes [in the Theresienstadt mausoleum] were kept in three types of boxes, all with a label bearing the name, birth-date and date of death. Prominent camp inmates had iron boxes, the less distinguished had wooden boxes, and the rest cardboard ones. The mausoleum was cleared a hundred boxes at a time. We would toss them to one another and, in the case of the iron, yell out: "Look out, here comes another celebrity." —Jacob Presser,zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQ The Destruction of the Dutch Jews You see, there are hierarchies among Jews The Viennese looked down on the Ostjuden and the German Jews looked down on the Viennese Jews and so you stayed with your own in order to avoid conflict. —Gertrude Schneider, quoted in "Women Surviving the Holocaust" I have a feeling, I said, about the axial lines of life, with respect to which you must be straight or else your existence is merely clownery, hiding tragedy. . . . Lately I have felt these thrilling lines again. . . . Truth, love, peace, bounty, usefulness, harmony! . . . At any time life can come together again and man be regenerated ... the man himself, finite and taped as he is, can still come where the axial lines are. He will be brought into focus. He will live with true joy. . . . Death will not be terrible to him if life is not. —Saul Bellow, The Adventures ofAugie March Author's Preface This play is set in Theresienstadt in 1944. As such it is a work of fiction inspired by fact. Like Shakespeare and countless other dramatists before me, I have taken history and shaped it to my own theatrical ends. Before setting out to write the play, I decided I must remain as faithful as possible to the facts I had researched. However, once I began writing, I was constantly aware that I was inventing scenes for which I had no documentary evidence or that I was attributing characteristics, attitudes, and relationships to "real" people which they probably never had. At first I was disturbed by this and was continually stopping work to consult documents for fear of betraying "reality" and laying myself open to accusations of lies and distortion. But as the play developed and began to assert a life and independence separate from its author, I began to realize that it was in fact mirroring the assertion by a former inmate of Theresienstadt that it was at times very difficult to distinguish reality from fantasy in the camp itself.1 And accordingly , since the play and its characters were stuck in a limbo somewhere between hell and earth, dream and waking, play-acting and life, to try to separate these aspects would paradoxically betray the sense of unreal reality pervading the camp. Still, the names of the characters continued to provide me with a problem. At first I decided to leave only four characters with their correct names in full: Kurt and Olga Gerron, Kommandant Rahm, and his second-in-command, Haindl. Gerron is the protagonist of the play, and since he is so clearly identifiable it would have been dilettantish of me to disguise him (and by association his 1. H. G. Adler,zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Theresienstadt: 1941-1945. Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft : Geschichte, Soziologie, Psychologie (Tubingen: Mohr, 1960). 39 40 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA THEATRE OF THE HOLOCAUST wife) under a pseudonym.2 Nor was there any reason for protecting the two Nazis behind false identities even though their characters were entirely different from how I portray them in the play. My greatest headache was how to name the cabaret artists...