Browse the Plays
-
- Experience Chronicled
- Allegoric or Metaphoric Representations
- Concentration and Extermination Camps
- Deniers and Denial
- Germany, Hitler and the Growth of Nazism
- European Jewry Before the Holocaust
- Escape
- The Ghettos
- Hiding
- Righteous Gentiles
- Rescue
- Resistance
- Liberation
- Nazi War Crimes and Judgement
- Other Victims of Nazi Persecution
- Perpetrators, Bystanders and Collaborators
- Survivors and Subsequent Generations
- Theater During Holocaust
- Women and the Holocaust
- Experience Chronicled
-
Recent Insights
- A Personal Welcome to the Holocaust Theater Catalog
- Many Questions and a Few Answers
- Comments to the Association of Holocaust Organizations (AHO) Conference
- Honoring Elie and Marion Wiesel for Their Plays
- NJTF HTII becomes part of UM MILLER CENTER
- Theatrical Depictions of Survivor Stories
- On Resort 76: Jewish Drama and Putting the Audience Through a Difficult Evening By Bruce Cohen, MFA – the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater
- NJTF Remembrance Readings Launched
- Online Women, Theatre, and the Holocaust Resource Handbook
- Almost Lost
Lost Childhood
Author(s): Janice Hamer & Mary Azrael
A three-act, full-length opera based on Dr. Yehuda Nir’s memoir of his childhood hiding from the Nazis in Poland during World War II, and on conversations with Dr. Gottfried Wagner. When Nir’s father was arrested in 1941, Yehuda was eleven years old, and in order to survive, he, his mother, and his teenage sister moved from place to place disguised as Polish Catholics. In the opera, Yehuda’s character Judah Gruenfeld opens up after 50 years of silence to a colleague and psychiatrist, Manfred Geyer (portraying Dr. Wagner), a German born after World War II and the son of a prominent family of Nazi sympathizers. Manfred’s questions open the floodgates and memories come rushing back.
Format: Opera
Snapshot
Notes:
Janice Hamer (composer); Mary Azrael (librettist); commissioned and developed by American Opera Projects.
Original or Prominent Production: November 9, 2013, The National Philharmonic presented the first complete concert performance of the opera at the Music Center at Strathmore, North Bethesda, MD to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
Original Source Material: Based on the memoir The Lost Childhood by Yehuda Nir and his conversations with Gottfried Wagner.Original Language: English