Description

8vo, br. ed. A meticulously researched book that collects sixteen playscripts written by European Jews imprisoned in the Terezin ghetto in the Czech Republic during the Holocaust. The concentration camp and Jewish ghetto at Terezin, or Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic, was a site of enormous suffering, fear, and death. But amid this horrific period, there was also a thriving and desperately vibrant cultural life. While the childrens 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, Performing Escape collects eleven theatrical textscabaret songs and sketches, historical and verse dramas, puppet plays, and a Purim playwritten 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 prologue by novelist Ivan Klima, 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 this anthology speaks of the prisoners persistence of hope in a harrowing time and will be a moving read for students and scholars of the Holocaust.