"Kindertransport," more than a theatre experience

A week ago, I saw a local production of "Kindertransport," a play written in 1993 by Diane Samuels, an English writer.  Starting with a London production, it has been produced all over the world.  In Portland, it marks the beginning of Kindertransport 2010,  "an ambitious community outreach project on genocide awareness, in anticipation of the UN’s Genocide Awareness Month this April."

What was I expecting?  Holocaust-focused art has always make  me anxious.  Guilt, one of my favored responses to many things, rises up.  Why have I not cared more about the death and displacement of millions of Jews?  But I did care, I do care.  Somehow that does not seem sufficient.  

As the play began on a mostly-bare stage, only cardboard boxes, my discomfort began.  Eva, a young German Jewish girl, 9 years old, cannot accept what her mother tells her:  she is about to be sent to England to live--alone.  It is 1938 in Berlin and the Germans have agreed to allow ten thousand Jewish children to be sent to families in there.  It was a strange bargain and must have been horrific for everyone involved.

Am I identifying with my own adolescent past when my mother sent me away to live with my father? Awful as that was, I had the luxury of believing  I was going to a better life.  Though Eva goes to Manchester, England with a concerned and loving mother, she is marked by her wish to conceal her origins.   That one is very familiar to me;  I spent high school denying my own past, though not my Jewishness, as Eva does.

Identity, is the dominant theme, and the one most identified in articles about the play.  For me it was also about the struggles between mothers and daughters from childhood to adolescence and beyond.  A dark play, I found it beautifully acted by the four women and one man in the cast.

It is playing here till March 21.  Sacha Reich, the director, (pictured here) has done an excellent job and  also coordinated the talk-backs following the play.  The one we heard was by Dr. Aart Lovenstein, a psychologist treating survivors of trauma.  Himself the child of Dutch Holocaust survivors, he added more to an understanding of the need for "forgetting" or denial by the adult Eva becomes.

In my former life as psychotherapist, one of my clients struggled for many years with her parents, Holocaust survivors, who refused to talk about their past.  She was finally helped by connecting with other children of survivors who have created a worldwide movement to support one another and understand what is, ultimately, the un-understandable.

I hope that it will be seen by non-Jewish audiences (though the empty reviews in both the Oregonian and Williamette Week would not help) since its message extends far beyond the particular setting of the play to our own times.  How do we allow ourselves, our country to stand aside as genocide happens far away?  It was not hard for the United States to turn away in 1938.

Comments

[Hattie]

Fascinating. Have you heard of Lorene Nussbaum, Emiritus Professor at Portland State, who was a childhood playmate of Anne Frank's sister? She and her family got out of Holland well ahead of the danger, which they saw coming.
She did a lot for me when I was in grad school and I am so grateful to her.
I too was farmed out whenever my family had a crisis, and I almost died three times before the age of six. I think of myself as a lucky survivor and this may explain my strong identification with child victims of that time (the same time frame, the early 40's.)
Wish I could see that play!

[Kay Dennison]

Fascinating!!!!

[m.e.]

One of my best teachers in grad school belonged to a children of holocaust survivors group, and she found it a life saver. She said one of their common experiences was that they had to parent their parents.

[Anne Gibert]

Good theater is a wonderful tool for communication. It sounds like a valuable play, one I would like to see if I get the chance.