The first of Carleton’s Performing History: Re-Staging the Past lectures, Dr. Lisa Peschel filled the multimedia lab in the MacOdrum Library Sept. 18 with an audience eager to learn about “Theatre and the Holocaust: Recently Rediscovered Scripts from the Terezín/Theresienstadt Ghetto.”
Peschel presented three scripts written and performed between 1941 and 1944, each demonstrating aspects of different communities in the ghetto.
“I argue that these scripts, these performances actually serve as a way for the prisoners to try and come to terms with what was going on with them,” Peschel said.
Acting on stage was a way to help save resilience, manage stress, and comment on some political events—even the most gruesome, Peschel explained.
“The theatrical space served as a kind of normal. It extended further too, not just the performance but out in rehearsals and those who came to watch and critique,” she said.
She continued, “This sort of safe space inside the theatre . . . [the prisoners] could take the stories of what was happening in the ghetto and turn them into comic narratives.”
“Tunes from beloved German operettas, with substituted Terezín themes, added a comedic manner to the performances and a reminder of home for the prisoners,” she said.
“Purimspiel,” written in cabaret style by Walter Freud, presents the city of Shushan as an ironic mirror image of Terezín. Freud used “a beloved memory, [and] he turned anxiety provoking labour into a public position of power,” Peschel said.
A focus of Peschel’s talk was the indifference on part of the Nazis towards prisoners entertaining themselves.
“Interestingly, the Nazis don’t seem to care,” Peschel said. “I asked the survivors and most of them think it’s because ‘they thought we all were going to die. They didn’t care with what we did in the last months of our lives’ . . . So there was very little censorship which bizarrely makes Terezín, as a ghetto, one of the freest artistic spaces in all of Europe during the war.”
Carleton history professor Susan Whitney came to see the presentation.
“I have never seen someone who is interested in the historical past actually perform segments of things that [Peschel] found,” Whitney said. “When you think about the conditions in which these plays and cabaret songs were performed, it makes it all the more wonderful that they can still be performed, that they survived.”
Peschel said she plans to have five performance festivals to showcase the scripts in the next few years. The mission, she said, is to get these works back on the stage and for the world to experience again the “absolute delight” they brought to Terezín.
