Christina Underwood

Emily-Grace Murray

Bria Grace Murray

Master Electrician - Michael A. Bert

Jeff Lorow

Jeff Huffnagle

Production Crew:

There is something disconcerting, even sacrilegious about turning the most horrific act of genocide into art. Yet to consider the baser side of humanity off limits to artistic exploration is to deny one of the most foundational tenets of the theatre: to remember as a community. If the truth of the Holocaust is to remain with us then it would follow that the most mimetic of all the arts must bear witness. Fiction writer Aharon Appelfeld explains, " A religious person will certainly argue in favor of silence, but what can we do? By his very nature... man has a kind of inner need for ritualization, not only of his joy, but also and perhaps essentially, of his pain and grief." Perhaps our inner need to collectively lament our past and our present has brought us to the theatre today.

Our play begins in a Polish shtetl in 1876 where Mordechai Weiss is born in the midst of a pogrom. His first lesson is to learn not to cry. Seventy years later the remaining members of the Weiss family struggle in isolation to reconcile their individual survival with the murder of six million Jews. We discover that the survivors of a world that permitted the Holocaust have learned their lessons well. Not only do they know not to cry, they no longer have the capacity.

The staging of Lusia's Holocaust testimony does not attempt to reconcile what is un-reconcilable. Yet the act of remembering may bring reconciliation to a family in crisis. Mordechai asks his daughters to "remember together. Maybe like that it would mean more." The theatre provides a means for us to do this as a community as we confront the fact that Holocaust survivors, still in our midst, will soon turn the responsibility over to us: "you are my witnesses." May we never fail to remember."

"We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future." - Miguel De Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

-Valerie Rae Smith, Director

I knew was coming the Depression? I knew the doors would be close here? I had a crystal ball showed ten years ahead to Hitler?

In August of 1939 Adolf Hitler declared the Polish people to be untermenschen or subhuman, regardless of their racial origins. "I have placed my death-head formation in readiness - for the present only in the east - with orders to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only then shall we gain the living space which we need." At 4:45am on September 1, 1939, German troops invaded Poland, initiating World War II. Within days the Polish Army succumbed to German forces. On September 17, Soviet divisions invaded Poland from the east. By the end of the month, all of Poland was under German and Soviet occupation. The Nazis immediately unleashed a campaign of terror against the population. Tend of thousands of Polish citizens were killed or sent to prison. Jewish populations under 500 were exterminated. Those who survived were displayed in public, forced to shave their beards, submit to beatings, urinate in the local synagogue, and use their prayer shawls and holy books to clean up the mess. The formation of ghettos effectively isolated the Jews making Nazi murder and deportation highly efficient. Men and women between the ages of 14 and 60 were conscripted into slave labor. Only the healthy could survive the starvation rations of ghetto life.

In 1942 Nazi officials assembled for the Wannsee Conference to discuss "The Final Solution." As a result, more than two million Polish Jews were transported in overcrowded trains to death or slave-labor camps in Poland and Germany. The elderly, the sick and the children were the first to be deported, most to death camps. Innocent of life outside the ghetto, many Jews believed that deportation would bring relief from the horrors of ghetto life. Lusia's mother has no knowledge of the gas chambers when she offers her daughter hope, "Maybe where they're sending us this time will be an improvement. In the country somewhere. At least not a ghetto." By autumn of 1944, the last Polish ghetto was evacuated.

Poland's most notorious concentration and labor camps included Auschwitz I, Pawiak Prison, Plaszow, Poniatowa, Stutthof and Trawniki. Upon arrival, men, women and children were separated into two groups: those who could work and those intended for the gas chambers. Barbara Lebow does not provide the details of Lusia, Mama, Hanna, or Duvid's concentration camp experience. Instead, the playwright leaves such horrors to the imagination of the audience - a realm that transcends the limitations of theatrical realism.

What more could Mordechai have done for his family? What more could we have done? Unfortunately, the U.S. was a :haven beyond reach." The Great Depression restricted immigration due to American labor issues. Many Americans were anti-immigration for the fear of job competition. The United States entered the war in 1942. Up until this time Americans received reports from Europe with skepticism. No one was prepared for the news accounts of concentration camp conditions when they were liberated in 1945. Newspapers focused on the mountains of corpses and the living skeletons of those still alive. By the close of the war Americans were finally paying attention and believing, unfortunately several years too late.

- Latasha Nehemiah, Student Dramaturg