Recently, my shul, the Beacon Hebrew Alliance, organized a group to come see Signs of Life. Last Friday night, during Shabbat services, I made a few remarks about the show, in anticipation of this event. I'm publishing these remarks below:
Shabbat Shalom.
I’ve been asked to say a few words about my musical drama, Signs of Life, which is now running off-Broadway, and which some of you will be seeing this coming Sunday.
Signs of Life takes place during World War Two in the Czech village of Terezin.
Terezin is the Czech name for a town about 45 minutes outside of Prague. Built as a Garrison town in the late 19th century, it’s near a fortress, and the town itself is surrounded by twelve meter-thick walls, with several gates the only way to get in and out.
In 1942, the Nazis evacuated Terezin, which they called Theresienstadt, and ordered all the Czech Jews to relocate to the town. Terezin, which had previously held eight thousand Czech residents, became the overcrowded home to over sixty thousand displaced Jews.
The first transport of German Jews arrived soon thereafter. These were mostly elderly, decorated veterans of World War One, some of them amputees. They had been told they were going to spa. Instead, they were forced to sleep in unheated attics on straw mattresses. Most of them did not survive very long.
The Nazis eventually designated Terezin as a “Model Ghetto,” a “City for the Jews.” They filled the town with Jewish “prominenten,” or prominent people, from around Europe, including artists, writers, composers, musicians, actors, and cabaret performers. They allowed these new residents of Terezin to create art, give concerts, and hold lectures. They “beautified” the ghetto, invited the Red Cross to visit, and made a propaganda film: “The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews.”
The Nazi propaganda effort not only covered up the terrible conditions within Terezin – the overcrowding, the malnutrition, the disease – but also helped to hide from the world the reality of the death camps in the East. Even as they allowed cultural activities within Terezin, the Nazis ordered frequent deportations of the town’s inmates to Auschwitz. The vast majority of Terezin residents eventually perished there.
Most Terezin residents did not know what awaited them in “The East.” But they knew the conditions in the ghetto were terrible. Even as they were forced to participate in the Nazi propaganda effort, they used their artistic skill to try to leave a record of the truth of their surroundings. Artists risked their lives to make sketches of the misery around them, and hid them away in basements, under floorboards, or behind bricks. Those who were caught doing this were deported to Auschwitz, or executed. Some of these hidden sketches were recovered years later, and they comprise an amazing visual record. This effort to tell the truth through art is central to the story in Signs of Life.
In addition to the efforts of visual artists, composers created operas that provided thinly veiled critiques of Nazi Germany, such as Viktor Ullman’s “The Kaiser of Atlantis,” and cabaret singers wrote and performed satirical songs about the ghetto.
Nevertheless, despite this amazing cultural output, and the efforts of the adults in the ghetto to shield the children from the very worst, of the 144,000 Jews who were sent to Terezin, only 17,247 survived the war. Of the 15,000 children, less than 150 survived.
My involvement with this story began before I was born. My mother, Anna Clara Deleeuw, was born in Holland during the war. Her mother died of complications soon thereafter, and my mother was placed with a family who pretended she was their own, while her father went into hiding. Her father survived the war, but her close relatives who did not include her great-Uncle Simon, and her Uncle Alex Deleeuw, for whom, in part, my own son, Alexander, is named.
My mother’s Great-Uncle Joseph Deleeuw (my great-great uncle), his wife, and their daughter Lucy were imprisoned in Terezin. Lucy eventually made it to Switzerland, but Joseph and his wife both perished.
Some years ago, I was approached by a woman named Virginia Criste about writing a musical theatre piece that takes place in Terezin during the war. Virginia had researched her own family’s connection to the ghetto, and had discovered her grandparents were on the last transport to Auschwitz. Aware of my own family connection to Terezin, I said yes to the project. In collaboration with composer Joel Derfner, lyricist Len Schiff, and director Jeremy Dobrish, we began researching, writing, and developing the project.
Research for the project involved reading a lot of books, visiting Prague and Terezin, and interviewing survivors. The survivors were especially helpful in giving us a sense of life as it was lived in the ghetto. Through a plethora of small details, their generous reminisces helped us bring the story alive. There is in our show, for example, a somewhat outlandish gift a young man gives to the girl he loves. Although the characters are fictional, the moment is real – such gifts were actually quite common, and highly valued. I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you what it is, but when you see the show, I think you’ll know.
This brings us to an important issue we are often asked about: to what extent did we base our characters, and the events of the show, on the historical record? The balance between truth and fiction is, of course, a tricky one to maintain with a subject and immense and terrible as the Shoah. No dramatic narrative can ever achieve the kind of detailed accuracy of non-fiction or documentary. But it can, hopefully, communicate some of what the New York Times refers to as “the rough authority of novelistic truth” – a truthful sense of how some of the history depicted may have felt as it was being experienced. This, we hope, will bring the history closer to home for the audience.
As such, we made the choice early on to draw from the historical record, but also to allow ourselves the toolbox available to us as creative artists. We also felt, as an ethical matter, that it would have been wrong to have tried get inside the thoughts of historical people who did not survive Terezin. Who can say, after all, what really went on in their minds, what their thoughts, fears, and hopes were? All we can do is imagine what those thoughts might have been. We therefore felt more comfortable taking that imaginative leap into fictional characters, whose experiences mirrored those of historical ones.
So, many of the events and characters depicted in Signs of Life are based on or inspired by real people and historical incidents. But, in the end, our show is narrative fiction, it is not history. We hope, for those interested in the Terezin, that Signs of Life can provide a kind of emotional entry into the subject. But it should not be viewed as a substitute for old-fashioned history.
An example of how this approach is reflected in the show itself: a famous cabaret singer named Kurt Gerron was an inmate in Terezin. We have a character named Kurt Gerard who is also a famous cabaret singer, and is similar in many – but not in all -- ways to his historical namesake.
Another question we are frequently asked is “why a musical?” There is a fear, not unjustified, that the musical form would trivialize the subject.
There are several parts this answer:
First, the historical Terezin was filled with music – cabaret, chorus, classical, opera, popular song – and in that way, the setting lends itself to the form.
In addition, the central drama of Terezin – the propaganda artifice that hides brutal reality – is, itself, highly theatrical, and naturally lends itself to musical theatre, the most highly theatrical dramatic form.
And, finally, the notion of the musical as something frothy and not suited to serious subjects is not one that we share. Showboat, Cabaret, Sweeney Todd, Assassins, Sound of Music, Fiddler on the Roof, and West Side Story all take on serious subjects. Ultimately, one could just as easily trivialize this subject in a non-musical play, or a novel.
The rule of thumb when writing a musical is that when the emotions are too intense for the spoken word, that’s when the characters sing. And, of course, you could not find a subject with greater or more intense emotions than this one.
I should also address something Elie Wiesel has said – that the Shoah should never be the subject of art, because any effort to create art from the Shoah will always fall short. I don’t entirely disagree with this. But, of course, Mr. Wiesel did create art out of the Shoah, with his autobiographical novel, Night. And the fact of the matter is, art is how human beings address and commemorate the great tragedies of our history, going all the way back, at the very least, to the war at Troy. I believe that if we do not try to grapple with this subject in art, we will have failed in our duty as human beings to remember the Shoah and to honor its victims.
The creators of Signs of Life have ourselves been deeply honored by the reaction of survivors who have seen our show. They have been enormously generous. While recognizing the need for compression of detail and for dramatic invention, they have said we captured something truthful and powerful about Terezin in our show, and have done so without the easy sentimentality that they so often find in efforts to deal with this subject. Their kind words have meant more to us than any newspaper review, no matter how enthusiastic, ever could.
I thank you for your time, and I look forward to seeing you at the show.
Signs of Life runs through March 21st.
To order tickets to Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin, click here.
To find out what critics and audiences are saying about Signs of Life, click here.
To visit the Signs of Life website, click here.
To find out more about Signs of Life off-Broadway, click here.
To visit the Signs of Life Facebook page, click here.
To visit Peter Ullian's Website, click here.
To find Peter Ullian's "Fan" Page on Facebook, click here.
To read Signs of Life Lyricist Len Schiff's blog, click here.
To visit Signs of Life composer Joel Derfner's website, click here.
To read Signs of Life composer Joel Derfner's blog, click here.
To visit director Jeremy Dobrish's website, click here.
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