| The Theatre Play |
Scenes of pictures of the Freiburger performance, 2005      
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The PlayGhetto Tears 1944 The accompanying photos show the staging of the play by students of the Theodor-Heuss -Gymnasium in Freiburg. The premiere took place on March 11, 2005. It was a successful, moving, and downright professional performance, directed by the actor and stage-manager Elmar Wittmann. A year before, in March 2004, the drama had been staged in the Wallgraben-Theatre by the Music Theater Workshop of the Freiburg Music School under the title “Maagal.” I wrote this play in 1998, inspired by the bountiful material from my research into the story of the “girls of Room 28,” and after a trip to Israel, which was kindly sponsored by the Maria Strecker-Daelen Foundation Pro Musica Viva. Music played an essential role in Room 28, because its supervisor, Ella Pollak, was a pianist and music teacher; she used to sing quite often with the children in the evenings. She also founded a choir and a trio, and she introduced them to concerts and operas, which were then staged in Theresienstadt. It is for this reason that I felt from the very beginning that this play needed a congenial composer to set music to some of the scenes. More about the Freiburg production on the homepage of the Theodor Heuss Gymnasium.
Ghetto Tears 1944 [Photo caption]
Excerpt of the Badische Zeitung, March 14, 2005 Marion KlötzerThe theatre group of the Theodor-Heuss Gymnasium in Freiburg presented the premiere of “Ghetto Tears 1944 – The Girls from Room 28“—a lively and compelling drama based on recent history. On the stage the girls sit around a large wooden table, while in the foreground Helga (Sarah Müller) is visiting her father (Paul Sigrist) in the barracks where the invalids are housed. Black and worn are their dresses, with a yellow star pinned to them. The short, haunting scenes portray a life of hunger and hardships, and yet also a life in which friendship, faith, and hope bloom. Solidarity, we learn, proves stronger than the daily nagging irritations, and it soon turns the cramped room into an enclave with its own laws. “We’ll only survive if we hold together,” says one of the girls, holding up her hand to swear the oath of “Maagal,“ the community of perfection. The outside world scarcely intrudes into this microcosm: Through the gauzy curtains, one can see the joyful preparations for the performance of the children’s opera Brundibár, hear about the deportations, the SS controls, and the war. Inside the community the girls find comfort, kindly surrogate mothers, and some time to be children. But, as Helga notes into her diary, “the sun has withdrawn from the earth,” the days grow darker, and in the distance the trains rattle unrelentingly through the night. Then the table is left empty.The young actors play their parts with concentration and empathy. At the end they eagerly ask the real Helga Kinsky, who came from Vienna to see the performance, about how the play was. “We were more cheerful, but you acted beautifully. I was a little afraid of this performance,“ she says, visibly moved. On Tuesday, Mrs Kinsky will be visiting several schools in Freiburg to tell students more about the girls of Room 28.
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