The Flight into Egypt

In the play’s first act, set in Lacznic Poland in 1939, a Jewish family is visited by an art professor who, though seemingly a gentile, is really a Jew passing in order to avoid the growing anti-Semitism of the academic world and to be able to leave for a professorship in New York. His visits lead to the family being attacked and only their daughter, with whom the art professor is in love, survives a horrific attack. Act 2 describes how the daughter, who is a gifted artist, is protected and hidden during the war in the basement apartment of a working class man. The benevolent common man and the art professor, who wants to assuage his guilt by returning to Poland after the war and convincing the young woman to leave for New York with him, are presented in sharp contrast.