Performing Captivity, Performing Escape: Cabarets and Plays from the Terezin/Theresienstadt Ghetto

by Lisa Peschel

The concentration camp and Jewish ghetto at Terezín, or Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic, was a site of enormous suffering, fear, and death; but in the midst of this was a thriving and desperately vibrant cultural life. While the children’s drawings and musical pieces created in the ghetto have become justly famous, the prisoners’ theatrical works, though a lesser-known aspect of their artistic endeavors, deserves serious attention as well. Performing Captivity collects eleven theatrical texts―cabaret songs and sketches, historical and verse dramas, puppet plays, and a Purim play―written by Czech and Austrian Jews. Together these works reveal the wide range of ways in which the prisoners engaged with and escaped from life in the ghetto through performance. The anthology opens with an insightful preface by novelist Ivan Klíma, who was interned in the ghetto as a child, and contains a detailed introduction by editor Lisa Peschel about the pre-war theatrical influences and wartime conditions that inspired the theater of the ghetto. The array of theatrical forms collected in Performing Captivity speaks of the prisoners’ persistence of hope in a harrowing time and will be moving reading for students of the Holocaust.

446 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2011

Reviews

[Sibyl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This thoroughly researched yet accessible work gives English speaking readers a chance to explore the work that was performed in the Terezin Ghetto. (The original plays, songs and poems were written in German and Czech.) Many of the texts in this book have only recently emerged into the public eye, having been kept privately by the families of Holocaust survivors.The books is beautifully illustrated with posters and drawings that were produced by the Ghetto's inmates.

In the UK Holocaust Memorial Day is marked every year. Yet how can we 'remember' something, if we know very little about it? Our current Prime Minister's recent jibe about 'a bunch of migrants' on this day, shows how little we have actually learned.

What this book succeeds in doing is revealing the creativity that found expression in adverse circumstances. In Theresienstadt art simultaneously functions as a means of escape, and as a - necessarily coded - act of resistance.

My own great-aunt was an inmate of the Ghetto, and I am glad that Lisa Peschel's book has enabled me to understand more about the society in which she lived. This is also a society in which many people died, through malnourishment and disease. Others did not survive because they went on transports from Theresienstadt to death camps. While some of the writers and performers whose work is featured here, were liberated in 1945 and went on to build new lives, others perished.

Reading this book is a way of honouring the dead, and keeping their names alive.