by Arnold Zable
Our hope for a theatre was born in the late-night hours after a long day of slave labour and whippings. We had nothing, and that was our strength. Not even a pencil, a piece of paper. Only a feeling in our hearts. I would hear people humming a melody…these melodies would not let go of me. They possessed so much pain and suffering… they grew in my mind into a vision which I could not put into words.
On a Sunday night, when the Gestapo dogs finally let us be, we would creep down from our bunks, shift the tables, and get to work. We would forget that we were in a concentration camp. We created backdrops and curtains from our mattresses. We made up our faces with the ash of burnt matches. And that is how it started...The audience gave us cigarette butts, the highest tribute we could have expected.
In May 1942, Sonia’s father and brother were herded into a train bound for the extermination camp Auschwitz. Years later, Sonia told me an extraordinary tale. Although not selected for deportation, she hurried to the station to join them against the objections of Alfred Rossner, the German textile factory manager for whom she worked. She could not bear the thought of separation.
Rossner drove his one-horse buggy to the station and searched frantically for Sonia. The platform was patrolled by armed SS men, but Rossner’s status as a factory manager engaged in the war effort allowed him to move about freely. He found Sonia inside a crowded wagon as the train was about to leave. He dragged her onto the platform, knocked her out, lifted her into the buggy, and drove her back to the factory.
Aron and Genek perished. Sonia was one of many ghetto inmates Rossner saved from deportation. He was revered for his concern for his workers. He shielded them from the SS, arranged escapes and warned them of impending deportation. He sent his German workers to the station to rescue them from the transports and provided escapees with refuge in his workshop. Rossner was arrested by the Gestapo towards the end of 1944 and executed by hanging. Over the years, Sonia spoke often of his goodness.
Sonia did not waste her reprieve. She continued performing in the Bedzin Ghetto in sketches of ghetto life, and recited texts detailing the suffering of the inmates, written by her friend Sofia Shpiglman, who was later murdered in Auschwitz. The performances were frowned on by the Judenrat, the Jewish council appointed by the Nazis to do their bidding. The Judenrat feared the negative impact the recitations might have on the inmates. The council members did not understand, as did Sonia, that performance was a means of lifting morale in desperate times: a form of resistance.
Out of the thirty thousand inmates of the Bedzin Ghetto, an estimated two thousand survived. The ghetto was liquidated in August 1943. Sonia was deported to the slave labour camp Annaberg and then to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. In January 1945, she was marched to the transit camp Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany. Despite the horror, she sang for some of the prisoners. She was among the thousands liberated by British troops on 15 April 1945.
The soldiers were horrified at the scenes that met them. Thousands of unburied corpses lay piled in the huts, in the doorways and scattered over the camp grounds. Inmates, infested with fleas and lice, huddled in the squalid huts shrunken to skeletons, dressed in rags, covered in filth and vomit, unable to move, even at the sight of their liberators. Men and women crawled through the mud and rose to their knees to kiss the hands and feet of British soldiers.
The camp housed Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, prisoners of war from many nations and, for the most part, Jews transported from Poland, Greece, Holland and Hungary and from slave labour and death camps throughout Germany and its occupied territories.
The bulk of the inmates, upwards of sixty thousand, were in Camp 1, dubbed the Horror Camp by British soldiers. Among them Sonia. Fifteen thousand prisoners of war were liberated from Camp 2, in the military barracks of the Panzer training school for German officers. Among them Sami.
More than thirty-five thousand inmates died in the ten months before liberation. Upwards of thirteen thousand were to die in the first five weeks after liberation, from many illnesses: typhus, tuberculosis, malnutrition and dysentery, and from overeating; their shrunken digestive systems were unable to cope after months of starvation. Sonia rarely spoke to me of this period.
Perhaps she was among the liberated women who raided the SS stores in search of clothes and make-up. They applied rouge, powder and lipstick to their gaunt faces to regain a sense of womanhood, and perfumes to negate the stench of confinement. The women were frantic. The make-up was as vital as food in returning their skeletal bodies to the living.
The British military ordered squads of SS men and women and German soldiers and civilians to load the bodies onto trucks and carts and transport them to pits for mass burial in the southwest corner of the camp. The sick and infested were scrubbed and deloused, issued new clothing, and provided with medical support. The inmates of Camp 1 were transported to the displaced persons camp, set up in the spacious grounds of the Panzer training school.
By 18 May, the evacuation was complete. British troops burnt the barracks of Camp 1 to the ground to prevent the further spread of disease. The last huts were destroyed in a ceremony on 21 May. A crowd of British soldiers and former inmates stood by and rejoiced as the camp was engulfed by flames. The physical destruction of the Horror Camp was finished; but the restoration of desire and hope had barely started.
In Bergen-Belsen, Sonia was reunited with Sami. They became foundation members of the camp’s Jewish Central Committee, and its culture department. Sonia joined Sami in creating a camp-based theatre. In one of the few stories she told me, Sonia said that she rode a bicycle through the camp in search of people with theatre skills, and invited them to join the newly formed ensemble. She cycled from block to block through the camp, which housed thousands.
The theatre drew in performers, musicians, artists, writers, tailors and technicians. Its members appropriated drapes from the British officers’ quarters to make costumes. They scavenged for props and make-up in nearby towns and villages, and they bartered cigarettes in exchange for reels of thread, timber and nails, materials and musical instruments. Sonia Boszkowska, Sami Feder, set-designer Berl Friedler and his wife, choreographer and dancer Dolly Kotz, were among the leading lights. Sami was the driving force.
The group first met on 14 July in classrooms the British had converted into an English language school. The venture was initially called Di Dramatishe Studye, the Drama Studio, and served as a school to enhance the skills of former actors and to train those with little performance experience. Sami conducted workshops on mime and rhythm, and gave lectures on literature and theatre history.
The studio was renamed the Kazet Theatre, the Concentration Camp Theatre, in honour of the actors who had performed under Feder’s direction in the camps and ghettos, many of whom had perished. Some of those who survived became key members of the ensemble. ‘Our duty,’ proclaimed the theatre banner, ‘is to spread light and culture.’
Sonia assisted Sami in gathering stories. She went from bed to bed in the camp hospital and collected testimonies from survivors. She retrieved and sang Yiddish songs, which were notated and adapted for performance. The works, compiled by Sami Feder and his collaborators, were published in 1946, titled: Zamlung fun Kazet un Ghetto Lieder, An Anthology of Songs and Poems from the Concentration Camps and Ghettos.
On the cover of the booklet is a watercolour of a skeletal figure. He wears white prison pants. His upper body is naked and his head is shaven. He is on his knees, back arched, arms outstretched, his bound hands reaching for the burning heavens. He is breaking free of the flames and the barbed wire that entangles him.
The anthology is illustrated by Berl Friedler: an inmate in striped prison clothes lies curled on the ground, his face twisted in a grimace; leather-booted men wield whips and rifles; a weeping woman kneels under the weight of the heavy load of her labour; an emaciated man huddles in an overcoat. Three men hang from the gallows before an assembly of prisoners, heads bowed, their bod
ies melded into an amorphous mass of figures. Two prisoners lie in a dark cell, beneath a tiny barred window; wounded slave-labourers stagger past electrified fences beneath guard towers. There are drawings of beatings and humiliations and photographs of intertwined corpses on the day of liberation.
The works are written by both unknown authors and established poets. A sense of rage and abandonment pervades them. Mothers weep for their lost children; inmates grieve the murders of their loved ones and the annihilation of entire communities. Lone men and women are driven to madness by the loss of their families.
The crimes are explicit: the deportations, the rapes and the mass disposal of bodies in crematoria. There are verses that depict the hunger that reduces men and women to jealous rages over an extra potato peel in the soup of a fellow prisoner; and the treachery of turncoats who tried to save their skins by doing the bidding of their captors.
The suffering is too recent to be watered down. To do so would be a betrayal. ‘Remember this,’ Feder writes in the foreword. ‘We sing these songs as a memory—and a warning.’ The works were the backbone of the ensemble’s initial performances.
The Kazet Theatre premiered on 6 September in a theatre tent, just metres from the site where thousands of inmates who had died from illness in the weeks after liberation were buried. The tent was erected in 1940 by the German military, the canvas stretched taut across aluminium girders. It housed a stage, a proscenium arch, backstage facilities and an underground heating system. Goebbels and Goering are said to have used the venue to lecture officers of the military academy.
An audience of three thousand crowded into a space that could accommodate one thousand. British officers and their secretaries stole in through the stage door; they would not move, despite Feder’s entreaties. Russian officers who had travelled two hundred kilometres to see the show demanded entrance. After a heated argument, Feder agreed to let them watch from the wings.
The many survivors who could not gain entrance jostled by the canvas, pleading and weeping. They had been denied so much for so long, the thought of missing out was unbearable. Thinking a mass demonstration was under way, British soldiers called for tanks to restore order. The stage was packed with those who had stolen in by a rear entrance. They had to be cleared before the performance could begin. The actors shouted their lines in the early scenes to be heard over the rumble of tanks and jeeps and the cries of the crowd outside.
The response of the audience was immediate and visceral. Many wept throughout the production. Some screamed and shouted, others became hysterical. The performers and the audience were barely distinguishable. They formed a single entity in their expression of loss and grief, offering it up as if in sacrifice to the gods of theatre. The space was reminiscent of the amphitheatres of ancient Greece, returning drama to its origins, as a ritual of communal release: an exorcism.
The actors did not portray themselves as victims. They did not shy away from re-enactments of their recent experiences. Given the horrors of the recent past it could not be otherwise. There was no longer a need for careful theatre, and no desire for subterfuge. The stage was a safe space. The impact was cathartic. At the end of the performance the audience fell into a prolonged silence.
There is a photo of twenty-two members of the troupe dressed in striped prison clothes. They are gathered in front of a stage set headed Eine Laus. Dein Tod! One Louse. Your Death! replicating the backdrop for Feder’s performers in the Bunzlau slave labour camp. The shadows of those in the back row fall on a white backdrop. Sami and Sonia can be made out, seated side by side in the centre row, but no one occupies pride of place.
The performers lean on each other. They look directly at the viewer. Their expressions are earnest and confronting. Ghostly almost. The trauma is writ on their faces, as too is a collective strength and a sense of defiance. We are here, they seem to say. Take us or leave us. We are not afraid to be seen as we are. One day we may go our separate ways. We may voyage to distant lands and build new lives, but in this moment in time we are here, and we are as one. We bear witness to ourselves, and we bear witness to each other. And in our being and our presence, we bear witness to our audience of survivors. When they see us on stage, they see themselves.
The Kazet Theatre rotated two programs in cabaret format—monodramas, songs, poems and dances, and dramatic sketches. One sketch, ‘This Is How It Began’, depicts the brutal round-ups, the intimidation and the initial incarceration in the ghettoes and death camps. Others depict the counterattack: acts of sabotage and espionage, uprisings and daring rescues.
In Sami Feder’s one-act play ‘Partisans’, Sonia performs the role of a resistance fighter who makes her way to Warsaw disguised as a cabaret singer. She infiltrates the German high command, sings in a low-cut black gown for an SS officer, and gains access to a cache of arms, which she steals for her band of partisans. The weapons are used to liberate a convoy of ghetto inmates bound for the death camps; the freed prisoners are transformed from listless slaves into fighters.
The Kazet Theatre used the symbols of Nazi persecution—SS insignias, the swastika, and prison garb—in the design of its costumes, stage sets and posters. A solo dance, choreographed by Dolly Kotz, depicts the pain of mothers torn from their children. Dolly performs in a striped prison dress in front of a black flag with a swastika enclosed in a white circle.
She cuddles an infant in her arms. As the baby is snatched away, her body contorts with pain. Her eyes are shut tight, and her face is a study of grief and unbearable longing. The horror cannot be diluted. The baby is bound for the crematorium. The murder of children is the greatest atrocity, and the deepest ache. It defies comprehension.
Sonia Boszkowska was the Kazet Theatre’s leading performer. Her signature act was Sami Feder’s poem Ikh bin a shotn, I am a shadow. The poem is dedicated to Sonia. Sami writes beneath the title: For Sonia, my comrade, a present. Sonia recites the poem in a white gown, her face white with make-up. Her arms are spread wide, and her open palms are turned upwards.
She is backed by a painting of a shapeless shadow rising from the stage floor, assuming the form of a monster as it widens: ‘I am a shadow on the world/ Like a shadow I lie on my bed…/ Existing in a dream/ Everything that was/ Everything I once knew is gone/ I cannot cry nor laugh…/ I do not even know what prayer I should make…/ What lamentations I should weep/ What Kaddish I should recite…
The gigantic head and massive shoulders of the shadow tower over Sonia. The head is bent forward, and the arms and hands form a grasping gesture. The contrast between the black mass and the figure in white accentuates the menace.
But Sonia stands undaunted. She appears detached, despite the horrors she is recounting: Oh, curse their bones/ I will confront them with the weeping of children/ The moans of the mothers and fathers/ The screams of the girls they raped/ Then poisoned and burnt/ They have made of me a shadow…/ But as a shadow I will haunt them day and night.
She recites ‘I Saw a Mountain’, by Yiddish poet Moshe Shulstein, a pre-war colleague of Feder. She stands in front of a backdrop painting of a mountain of shoes. She wears a black gown, a striped cape and a prison-blouse with a yellow Star of David pinned to the chest.
Her arms reach out; her entire body is a gesture of longing: ‘I saw a mountain higher than Mont Blanc/ And more sacred than Mount Sinai…/ In this world, this mountain stood/ Such a mountain I saw of shoes in Maidanek/ Hear! Hear the march/ Hear the shuffle of shoes left behind…/ Make way for the rows—for the pairs/ For the generations—for the years…/ The shoe army—it moves and moves…/ We are the shoes/ We are the last witnesses.
Sonia Boszkowska was versed in a pre-war Yiddish song and theatre genre known as word concerts—solo performances devoted to the recital of literary works. She sings ‘Eins, Zwei, Drei’, a song reflecting on life’s fluctuating fortunes; and she is with the ensemble of Der Goel, The Redeemer, a play by Emil Bernhard, which Feder had directed in the Bunzlau concentration camp two years earlier.
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Feder’s one-act adaptation is set in the camp. It culminates in the prescient pre-war hymn ‘Es Brent’, It’s Burning, composed in 1938 by the carpenter songwriter Mordechai Gebirtig, who was shot four years later as he was marched from the Krakow Ghetto to the cattle wagons.
The song complements the play in its expression of anger at the townsfolks’ passive reaction: It’s burning, brothers it’s burning/ Our impoverished shtetl is burning/ Angry winds are blowing/ Breaking, burning and destroying/ And you stand and look on with folded arms/ And you stand and look on while our shtetl burns.
The redeemer is unmasked; he is a false messiah. The townsfolk are angered and empowered. They know they must fend for themselves and answer the call to resistance: Don’t just stand there, brothers/ With your folded arms/ Don’t just stand there, brothers/ Put out the fire…
Sonia performs both pre-war Yiddish songs and a new generation of songs risen from the ashes. She sings a ballad that extolls the exploits of a partisan girl, written by the poet Hirsh Glik in the Vilna Ghetto, barely two years earlier. ‘Quiet, the night is full of stars/ And the frost is burning strong/ Remember how I once taught you/ To hold a gun in your hand.’
Sonia is part of the ensemble that recreates a scene from the Bunzlau slave labour camp: Sami Feder and his comrades singing in the barracks late at night, to alleviate their suffering. A single candle lights the stage of the tent theatre as the performers now sing to depict their state of displacement.
And Sonia is part of the ensemble for the final song, the climax: ‘Zog Nisht Keynmol’, Never Say, Hirsh Glik’s partisan anthem: Never say you are on your last way/ When blue skies are concealed by clouds of grey/ The hour we have longed for is surely near/ Beneath our tread the earth shall tremble: we are here!
On the night of the premiere, the audience stood and sang the anthem with the performers. It was their collective moment. They were free to release their voices. It may have been the first time following the war that the partisan hymn was sung by the audience to conclude a memorial ritual. In years to come, it would become the standard.