Eva Weaver's Blog: 'The Puppet Boy of Warsaw' - Posts Tagged "creativity"
The Puppet Boy of Warsaw- how it all started
It all started with a coat…. or rather with an image – a sentence that emerged from a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise amongst a group of artists I had gathered to dream up a new performance project. It was the picture of a large black coat with a multitude of small, hidden pockets, harbouring many personal treasures: a pocket coat.
The performance project never took shape, but I had stumbled over the kernel of a story. Intrigued, I started to write about this coat, and what began as a sentence became a short story. I trusted it, followed its thread and gave it space. It soon took me to the Warsaw ghetto and to Mika, a young Jewish boy and his grandfather. Then the puppets appeared, which lived in a small workshop and later in Mika’s pocket coat. The story grew and at some point, the German soldier Max appeared, together with his son and his granddaughter. I realised that I wanted to explore the impact of this devastating war on all sides and on the next generations.
The Second World War is not a new theme for me. I have made performance work for several years which dealt with history and in particular the Holocaust, yet as a German woman living in the UK, I still felt a strong need to attend to this deep wound in a more substantial way. Writing gave me an opportunity to explore many complex questions in more depth and also to reach a wider audience.
Over sixty million people died as a result of the Second World War, six million of those Jews. The Puppet Boy of Warsaw became my attempt to give those numbers a human face, to honour the dead and not forget their heart-wrenching and often heroic stories.
I researched the life in the Warsaw ghetto through eyewitness reports, diaries, articles and fiction and worked with much visual material – photographs, drawings, even films – the ghetto was well documented. I also visited Krakow and Warsaw in October 2010, tracing the remains of the Jewish Warsaw and the ghetto.
I was deeply moved to learn about the resistance and resilience of the Jewish women, men and children – how in the deepest despair and horror people risked their lives daily to help each other, such as the many ‘smuggler-children’ who squeezed through small holes in the wall to steal, beg or barter for food on the Aryan side and bring it back into the ghetto; people like Irena Sendler who saved hundreds of children by smuggling them out of the ghetto and hiding them, or Janusz Korzcak and the children of his orphanage, whose story I had known since my teens. It was devastating to learn more about the deportations of nearly 300.000 Jews to the death camps of Treblinka and about the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the largest Jewish uprising during the Second World War in which hundreds of young people, including many young women, fought heroically until their deaths against an overwhelming German force.
The power of the arts to strengthen the human spirit even in the most horrendous circumstances, has always intrigued and fascinated me and it touched me greatly how in the overcrowded ghetto musicians, singers, dancers, actors and artists still managed to put on productions, concerts and theatre shows. Art helps us to survive, to preserve our humanness in the face of atrocities and supports our attempt to make sense of our world, even if everything seems to fall apart around us.
For more back ground into, pics etc on 'The Puppet Boy of Warsaw' https://www.facebook.com/thepuppetboy...The Puppet Boy Of Warsaw
The performance project never took shape, but I had stumbled over the kernel of a story. Intrigued, I started to write about this coat, and what began as a sentence became a short story. I trusted it, followed its thread and gave it space. It soon took me to the Warsaw ghetto and to Mika, a young Jewish boy and his grandfather. Then the puppets appeared, which lived in a small workshop and later in Mika’s pocket coat. The story grew and at some point, the German soldier Max appeared, together with his son and his granddaughter. I realised that I wanted to explore the impact of this devastating war on all sides and on the next generations.
The Second World War is not a new theme for me. I have made performance work for several years which dealt with history and in particular the Holocaust, yet as a German woman living in the UK, I still felt a strong need to attend to this deep wound in a more substantial way. Writing gave me an opportunity to explore many complex questions in more depth and also to reach a wider audience.
Over sixty million people died as a result of the Second World War, six million of those Jews. The Puppet Boy of Warsaw became my attempt to give those numbers a human face, to honour the dead and not forget their heart-wrenching and often heroic stories.
I researched the life in the Warsaw ghetto through eyewitness reports, diaries, articles and fiction and worked with much visual material – photographs, drawings, even films – the ghetto was well documented. I also visited Krakow and Warsaw in October 2010, tracing the remains of the Jewish Warsaw and the ghetto.
I was deeply moved to learn about the resistance and resilience of the Jewish women, men and children – how in the deepest despair and horror people risked their lives daily to help each other, such as the many ‘smuggler-children’ who squeezed through small holes in the wall to steal, beg or barter for food on the Aryan side and bring it back into the ghetto; people like Irena Sendler who saved hundreds of children by smuggling them out of the ghetto and hiding them, or Janusz Korzcak and the children of his orphanage, whose story I had known since my teens. It was devastating to learn more about the deportations of nearly 300.000 Jews to the death camps of Treblinka and about the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the largest Jewish uprising during the Second World War in which hundreds of young people, including many young women, fought heroically until their deaths against an overwhelming German force.
The power of the arts to strengthen the human spirit even in the most horrendous circumstances, has always intrigued and fascinated me and it touched me greatly how in the overcrowded ghetto musicians, singers, dancers, actors and artists still managed to put on productions, concerts and theatre shows. Art helps us to survive, to preserve our humanness in the face of atrocities and supports our attempt to make sense of our world, even if everything seems to fall apart around us.
For more back ground into, pics etc on 'The Puppet Boy of Warsaw' https://www.facebook.com/thepuppetboy...The Puppet Boy Of Warsaw
