Response to Playing For Time

It's 7:44am, it's my second coffee of the day and I'm sitting on a train heading back to my hometown/homeplace/place-of-home(?) that is the Wirral: a glorious, coastal, soul-sucking vacuum; where returning always feels like shrugging on an old, itchy, Wooly jumper (pun intended) that I've outgrown: a geographical clique whose tedious secrets I was never let in on and spat me out a long time ago.
At this point in my life, I think I'd rather have a job sniffing farts and scoring them out of ten than live in place where one might go to vegetate in a retirement home with a salty, sea view, or buy a house with a mortgage that screams future divorce and succeeding mid-life crisis. Don't worry, I'm not as bitter as you might think and I actually had an amazing childhood and still have a circle of friends on the Wirral, but caffeine has quickened my typing thumbs and sharpened my reckless tongue.


But. What if. What if. What if.


Let's rewind to 1935. What if I were Jewish (and a Jewish woman at that), student, travelling on a train, writing something outspoken to a public medium and living in Germany. Maybe at the next stop, SS guards would have spotted a yellow Star of David on my jacket breast and hauled me off the train; like real-life embodiments of the hounds of hell who burned my words and tried to scour the innards of my brain with bleach.

Would I have been able to return home to my parents in 1935, just 80 years ago?

I am thankful that I am fortunate enough to live in a country with freedom of speech and freewill, and although I am not religious, I would be free to belong to a religion without dictatorial persecution. One lady, whose rights such as these were snatched away by the Nazi regime, was Fania Fénelon.

Fania Fénelon was a French musician, composer and cabaret singer who was living in Nazi-occupied Paris at the time of her arrest. She was half-Jewish, supported the French Resistance and throughout the duration of her incarceration in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Fania kept a diary of her life inside the notorious, working camp.

Her memoirs were documented in the form of a play, by Arthur Miller - Playing For Time.

I blogged about wanting to see the play earlier in the year and indeed, I went to Sheffield to see the play at the Crucible a few weeks ago with my German friend, Clara. I often find it hard to talk to Clara about the Holocaust, although she has always been open when asked questions on Vergangenheitsbewältigung (as 'vlogged', back in Feb). We were both very emotional when watching PFT, and especially stunned at Siân Phillips' searing performance.

You can watch the trailer here, but really, I implore you to go and see this play for the finale performance tonight, at the Crucible theatre. Take tissues.

An Interview with a native...

You'll only be able to understand the following interview, wenn Sie deutsch sprechen können.
In the interview I'm discussing with my lovely beste Freundin, Clara, about Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) as a third generation, native German speaker, and how Germany's confrontation with the past has shaped her life.

Apologies for the poor sound and video quality, but I hope you enjoy the interview and if you'd like to hear a translation of the interview - keep your eyes peeled on this blog within the next few weeks!

Playing for Time

Like a true ENFP, I've been very distracted lately. I've taken up Brasilian jiu-jitsu to compliment the tri-weekly training sessions I attend for Underwater Hockey, last week I presented at the UGRE event to talk about my experience as an intern for this project, and tonight I'm teaching the Escape:CYT group how to give an Indian Head Massage (sure, anytime you like).

I haven't been organised enough to write any posts lately but I've been scribbling them up in my brain to type down the minute I get 20 minutes of free time.

My favourite milk-shake bar has an index of flyers on the windowsill, and a few nights ago I had a peruse whilst I waited for my Reece's Pieces regular shake. I saw a flyer for a play that is on at the Crucible Theatre throughout March and April with tickets available from £5 to £23. I want to plan a trip to Sheffield to see Playing for Time, a critically acclaimed.play by Arthur Miller based on Fania Fénelon's autobiographical memoir inside Auschwitz. Making music with an orchestra of women prisoners, Fania sang for the Nazi captors in an act of survival.

It sounds brilliant, and I'd really like to see it with a group of like-minded drama enthusiasts who read German, as well as thinking about it as a piece of Holocaust literature.

Stuart Taberner on South African TV!

Taken with a play

I'm exhausted. That kind of curtains-closed, emotionally drawn tired that sucks out the marrow of life. No doubt thanks to the stunning play I saw this afternoon at the Theatre Royal, as Taken at Midnight unfolded on the stage. It was brilliant.

As I travel back to Costa del Merseyside for the weekend, I'm left crashing hard on to the rocks of an emotion hangover. I'm reeling from the 'second-hand emotion' (Thanks, Downton) of Penelope Wilton, whose role was the mother of incarcerated Hans Litten (Martin Hutson). Not a single line was wasted. The set was cast in expressionistic shadow which framed the harsh lines and sharp angles of the cell walls. I sound pretentious, but full disclosure: I don't care - this stuff interests me and it's my blog.

Despite the mise en scène, it felt very real. And it was; Taken at Midnight portrays the true story of Hans Litten's call to put Hitler in the witness stand and his struggle afterwards. I thought Hutson played Litten's last months in Dachau like a broken man reads his bruises like instructions. It was so powerful that I felt overwhelmed all at once by the weighty fact that 6 million+ people were murdered.

Plays like Taken at Midnight not only offer a voice for political prisoners, but show the brutality of SS and SA soldiers before the war broke out. I hope this 'sort-of' review has done the play justice.

You can watch an interview with Penelope Wilton and director, Mark Hayhurst, here:

In other theatre related news, earlier this week when I told one of my housemates that I'd been to see Kindertransport, a play about children of the Holocaust, she asked, "What's the Holocaust?". I was shocked that even at 22, she has no knowledge of the Holocaust at all. She may be smart, but she won't be the only one! The average age in Theatre Royal today must've been about 50. I guess that I, at 21, was one of the youngest members of the audience. Are my generation even bothered about Holocaust memory? If humans don't know or care about the horrors of the past, we cannot learn from it and are therefore destined to repeat it.

As I return to the Wirral in a lottery/lucky dip between confusion and sentiment you may find I'm only contactable by owl post this weekend. Alternatively, you could try morse code but even the Wizza has signal these days.

Welcome, King of Changetown! Population: You.

This image came up on Facebook, but it hasn't been easy to find the original source. Thanks to our best friend Google, about 707,000,000 results popped up in 0.19 seconds (impressive) but I still haven't found the original link - please bare with me.

These days it's hard to commit to stuff. Pro-activity can be a chore and on some days I can't say I'd be an advocate of committing to anything more than to the bottom of a Vaseline tin. However, this image boiled away at my brain...

I want to be productive and pro-active but it's hard to materialize the confidence to say that you're THAT shiny orb of sunshine and lead a new initiative that promotes change. It's not just standing in the firing line, but it's also a huge responsibility to guard the facts and to be right. I suppose most people pretend that they're right, so much so that it is no longer a pretense. Again, I admit I'm getting onto a subject that I don't really know much about so that is where I'll stop.

I want everyone to be bothered by learning about the Holocaust. Does that make sense? I feel so strongly that people need to know about it, that it hurts. Even in the face of something so awful, one has to choose to learn about it, in order to learn from it. However as Ruth Rogoff asserts, and publicly shares her experience on the  The Children of the Holocaust (still on BBC iPlayer if you're reading this before 14/02/15), although it's important to learn about history and believe that genocide will never happen again, the fact is; as parents and human beings, we do make the same mistakes that we promised ourselves we'd never do again. It's the 'frailty of the human being' to repeat mistakes. Ruth also says that children and young people are more tolerant and that 'it's getting better'.

I am unsure what to think. Who is going to take the responsibility to inform people? The Children of the Holocaust was a stunning and thought-provoking programme with artistic visions aimed for young people. Those 45 minutes document themes like Kindertransport and experiences in a concentration camp with accessible language, images and testimonies - I hope that everyone gets the chance to see it while they can.

But in 100 years, who is going to provide testimonies? Of course, these are all questions that have been asked before and there is a lot of literature that can testify too. There seems to be so much genocide in the newspapers and media every day. Have we really learned anything at all?

Asking questions and trying to form a coherent answer isn't enough. There's hope in that there are opportunities of future workshops for schools being developed that teaches empathy to young people.

But does too much empathy mystify the past? The door needs to be opened for future generations of young people to develop their own humanity without mystifying the past events. After all, we are put on earth to be human....

Pre-performance discussion of 'Kindertransport'

As I walked into campus this morning on my way to the Kindertransport workshop (FYI with hair channelling my inner-Hagrid and Premonitions blasting through my headphones), I realised I knew basically nothing about the reality of Kindertransport.

Yeah, I knew about the facts. Over a 9 month period starting days after the devastation of Kristallnacht in 1938, 10,000 Jewish refugee children bundled onto trains after having been waved off by parents they'd likely never see again.

Yeah, I'd seen the play a few years back and one of my friends currently studying Drama in Lancaster  is rehearsing it at the moment. But I hadn't really taken it in.

Then I remembered I'd read a book as a child by Barry Turner, about the deportation of thousands of Jewish children. One Small Suitcase is based on true accounts of Kindertransport, and what it means to be separated from family, or rather sent away by parents in the hope of a life without persecution.

What I didn't realise is that many of the accounts were not happy ones.

After the 'Falling to our knees' performance a member of the Holocaust Survivors Friendship Association, Martin Kapel, shared his account of Kindertransport. He described how difficult it was to reconnect with his mother, who had a visa in France,

The play Kindertransport is about a woman who comes to face her past and open up to the memories and heritage she had tried to askew. In the workshop, Rachel and Maureen from LAC  shared with us their knowledge of the deportation of Jewish children in 1938. They explained that the refugees could have  been placed in a lottery of foster homes, where many children were expected to work for keep. Some children, like Eva in the play, were fortunate that a proportion of foster parents just wanted to 'help' but the fact remains that the people looking after the children could've been anyone. It's such a stark contrast to the process of fostering a child in today's society, where fostering parties must jump through governmental hoops, a year's worth of paperwork and most importantly - CRB checks. In 1938 there was the need to place the children quickly (9 months...) so there was no barrier against the type of people who volunteered to protect a child - especially those with ulterior motives.

We can only thank the survivors who share their experiences with us.